As a noob here I assumed these are legitimate folks with good intentions. Am I wrong?

Maybe it has always been this way but it seems like these days it's only a matter of time before anyone "authentic" (or at least seems authentic at first) turns into some type of grifter. If you have a big enough following there is too much money to be made not to grift.

How exactly has Simon been grifting?

Visit his site.

"Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now"

It's immediately obvious it's bullshit.

Gonna have to disagree with you there chief.

I've followed SimonW for quite some time and bullshit/grifting is just NOT something he does.

On the contrary, I've learned a great deal from him and appreciate his contributions.

I used to follow Fireship, I even have him connected on LinkedIn. Look where he is now. I also used to follow simonw, but I think he is going down the same spiral.

Where is Fireship now? I sometimes watch their 100-second summary videos, but I know nothing else about them.

His channel is apparently owned by a "private equity" and his videos have largely become ads.

> I've learned a great deal from him

What have you learned, other than "[latest AI grift] is the future and I should invest all my money into it now"?

There are some things that you should not admit publicly lol.

I completely and utterly disagree. Simon is no gifter. Intellectually lazy snobs think that any time someone has genuine delight and excitement about something that they’re “grifting.” Also, for anyone who is trying (regardless of whether they are succeeding) the to make money—that isn’t synonymous with “grifting.” God, some of you need a better relationship with a dictionary.

Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?

> Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?

This probably isn't a line of argument you want to go down. I've been unemployed for 7 months, in part due to how difficult it is to get so much as an intro call because so many people have totally automated the process of spamming every open job posting with as many resumes (many of which were likely LLM-generated as well) as possible.

I really hope you're making a lot of money out of this, because if not, this comment just comes across as sad.