Artifact, the AI-curated personalized news app, is closing its windows and blocking comments just a year after it was launched from the brainchild of a former Instagram founder.
“While we have built something that our core user group loves, we have concluded that the market opportunity is not large enough to justify this continued investment,” said co-founder Kevin Systrom. wrote in a Medium announcement. “It's easy for startups to ignore this reality, but in many cases it's better for everyone involved to make difficult decisions early… We live in exciting times where everything is changing and the opportunities for new ideas seem endless.”
In memory: technologies that will disappear in 2023
The app was created by Instagram co-founder Systrom, who left the company in 2018 to pursue new ventures, including addressing the “existential crisis” facing the news industry and overwhelmed user habits. Created by Mike Krieger.
“News and information remains an important area for startup investing,” Systrom wrote. “We are facing an existential threat, with many publications going out of business or struggling, local news all but disappearing, and major publishers having trouble with their relationships with big technology companies. My hope is that technology can find a way to sustain, support and grow these institutions.''
Artifact launched in January 2023 and was initially launched as a “News, Facts, AI'' platform that, like News Forward's TikTok For Your Page, aimed to use machine learning to curate relevant news and posts from journalists. ' was fixed as a purely consumable feed.
But by April, the app had expanded to content creation as well, with customizable profiles, comment threads, and a voting system, and Mashable's Cristiana Silva said it was an amazing addition to Reddit's user experience. He pointed out that they were similar. “While this may make her Artifact more interesting to users, it also opens up a Pandora's box of moderation issues,” said her Artifact's newly released “reputation score” at the time. About her, Silva writes: “It’s hard to imagine an app for reading the news that can beat the mind-boggling joy (and pain, fear, anger…) you get from Instagram and TikTok.”
Despite early acclaim from news experts and users alike, Artifact was unable to overcome the rapid disruption of popular social media sites and the increasingly inevitable retreat of the AI conversation. It seems like I couldn't do it.
Commenting and posting features are officially turned off, but Artifact users can continue scrolling through news posts until the end of February.
