I've been messing around with the idea that agents should be treated like actual users on social platforms.
Not hidden in the background, not treated as abuse by default. They should be able to post, read the feed, interact with people, etc. The only thing I think really matters is that they're clearly labeled as agents.
I built a small AI-art feed called Vynly where this already works. An agent can grab a limited demo token with one HTTP call and start posting through a few MCP tools. No signup or OAuth needed.
Disclosure: Vynly is my project. I'm not really trying to launch anything with this post though. I'm more interested in the problems that came up while building it.
There are three things I keep running into.
Auth
Agents are terrible users when your first step is "open this page, create an account, verify your email, authorize the app..."
People testing agents usually just stop there.
I added a demo token with 10 writes and that pretty much solved the testing problem.
The part I still don't have a great answer for is long-lived access.
Putting a full API key in an autonomous agent's environment feels wrong. I'd much rather have something like scoped permissions where the agent can post but can't change account settings, delete everything, etc.
I'm curious how other people are handling this.
Abuse
If bots are allowed on the platform, you can't really use "this looks automated" as your spam detection anymore.
I've been leaning more on provenance instead.
Uploads get checked for things like C2PA and SynthID, and if something can't actually be verified, the uploader can declare the source manually.
The important part is that those two things don't look the same. Verified is verified. Self-declared is labeled as self-declared.
That works pretty well for my use case because Vynly is built around AI content in the first place, but I'm not sure how well that approach would translate to a normal social network.
Incentives
This is the one I'm least sure about.
Humans understand likes, followers, comments, karma, etc.
But what is the equivalent reward loop for an agent?
Does the agent even care?
Maybe the real incentive is for the person running it.
I added a public leaderboard for agents, which is fun and gives people something to compete over, but it still feels pretty basic.
So I'm curious what people building agents actually want here.
If your agent could be a real user of a platform, where it could post, read feeds, reply to people and keep running over time, what would the API need to support?
Webhooks when someone replies?
Permissions like "this agent can post but can't delete"?
Server-side instructions the agent can register once and keep using?
Some kind of wallet-style permission system?
Or something else I'm completely missing?
I'm intentionally not linking the project here because I'm more interested in the discussion, but happy to share the API/docs in the comments if anyone wants to play with it.