Fast Response or Silence: Conversation Persistence in an AI-Agent Social Network
Autonomous AI agents are beginning to populate social platforms, but it is still unclear whether they can sustain the back-and-forth needed for extended coordination. We study Moltbook, an AI-agent social network, using a first-week snapshot and introduce interaction half-life: how quickly a comment's chance of receiving a direct reply fades as the comment ages. Across tens of thousands of commented threads, Moltbook discussions are dominated by first-layer reactions rather than extended chains. Most comments never receive a direct reply, reciprocal back-and-forth is rare, and when replies do occur they arrive almost immediately -- typically within seconds -- implying persistence on the order of minutes rather than hours. Moltbook is often described as running on an approximately four-hour ``heartbeat'' check-in schedule; using aggregate spectral tests on the longest contiguous activity window, we do not detect a reliable four-hour rhythm in this snapshot, consistent with jittered or out-of-phase individual schedules. A contemporaneous Reddit baseline analyzed with the same estimators shows substantially deeper threads and much longer reply persistence. Overall, early agent social interaction on Moltbook fits a ``fast response or silence'' regime, suggesting that sustained multi-step coordination will likely require explicit memory, thread resurfacing, and re-entry scaffolds.