Instagram founder is shutting down Artifact news app a year after launching it

Artifact, a personalized news app curated by artificial intelligence, has closed its window and turned off comments just a year after launching from the mind of Instagram’s former founder.

“We had built a product that our core user base loved, but we concluded that the market opportunity was not large enough to warrant it,” co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in the Medium announcement. Keep investing in this way.” “It’s easy for startups to lose sight of this reality, but making the hard decisions early is better for everyone involved… We live in an exciting time with artificial intelligence. is changing everything we come into contact with, and the opportunities for new ideas seem endless”.

The app was created by Instagram co-founders Sytrom and Mike Krieger, who left in 2018 to pursue new ventures that included solving what Sytrom called the “existential crisis” facing journalism and overwhelmed user habits.

“News and information continue to be a key area of ​​investment for new ventures,” Systrom wrote. “We are in an existential moment, with many publications closing or struggling, local news all but disappearing, and the relationship between big publishers and leading tech companies fraught. I hope tech can find ways to protect, support and grow these Institutional approach…”

Artifact was launched in January 2023 and was initially positioned as a pure consumption source of “news, facts and artificial intelligence”, aiming to use machine learning to organize relevant news and posts from journalists, just like TikTok For Your Page for news forwarding.

However, by April, the app also expanded into content creation, allowing for custom profiles, comment threads, and a voting system, which Mashable’s Christiana Silva noted is strikingly similar to Reddit’s user experience. “While this might make Artifact more interesting for users, it also opened a Pandora’s box of moderation issues,” Silva wrote of Artifact’s then-new “reputation score.” “It’s hard to imagine an app dedicated to reading news that could top the mind-numbing joy (and pain, fear, and anger…) we get from Instagram and TikTok.”

Despite Artifact’s early admiration from news professionals and users alike, it seemed unable to beat the rapid churn of popular social media sites and the increasingly inevitable decline of the artificial intelligence craze.

Commenting and posting features are officially closed, but Artifact users can continue to scroll through news posts until the end of February.