Hacker NewsI was setting up OpenClaw and went looking for best skills and hosting - and I'm really puzzled.
On one hand I see runaway popularity - 247K GitHub stars. 13,700 community skills. - I read about Chinese cloud provider forks. Stock market rally. Hosting providers offering managed OpenClaw hosting, same tier as WordPress.
But when I look at OpenClaw hub - the most-downloaded skill has 35K installs - Highest-rated skill: 132 stars
247K stars vs 35K installs looks like huge gap for me.
Other observations - Popular skills are pedestrian connectors (Gmail, search, Obsidian, Home Assistant) — things a dozen other tools already do - a lot of stock/trade skills, many in Chinese - I get charged per API call (I use Claude) on top of my monthly subscription
I read news about - "lobster trade", where stock rallies on OpenClaw-related announcements - Government subsidy: Shenzhen offering up to $1.4M grants for OpenClaw-based one-person companies, Wuxi $730K - company stock rallying in China when a company announces OpenClaw
I wanted to use OpenClaw in conjunciton with my robotics startup PMF search. I checked OpenClawRobotics - a community site for applying OpenClaw to robotics - and it appears to be abandoned. The signup form doesn't work.
Claude tells me - managed OpenClaw hosting now available is the telling signal. Infrastructure providers commoditize projects when novelty has passed and recurring revenue becomes the play. Late-cycle behavior, not early-cycle. - "Lobster trade" is a stock market phenomenon, not product adoption.
Don't get me wrong, I love the OpenClaw project. But I can't help noticing this and scratching my head.
What do you think?
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