Instagram's co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app | Hacker News Reader

Instagram's co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app

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[Dupe]

More earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612

I tried using Artifact but I found the way they gamified the app to encourage users to come back and click on articles to be very unhealthy. News can often be stressful, it's good to take breaks. It's also healthy to sometimes reduce your news intake to things that specifically affect your life. These things are basically the opposite of how Artifact was designed to be used.

Agreed. The UX was pleasant, but the gamification felt slimy, and the surfeit of throw-every-topic-at-the-wall push notifications really turned me off.

(Actually, I turned _them_ off, and promptly forgot about the app over a year ago.)

I enjoyed using this app and will be sad to see my current 217 day streak end.

While it's far from the only app that offered a reader mode, its implementation handled some of the more esoteric news sources (with disruptive layouts) better than the others I've tried. But the feature I will miss the most is title rewriting ("mark as clickbait") which I now hope to see as a feature on all my "reader" class apps (news, email, etc).

Great work, and kudos to the team.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, why do these news apps like this one or Prismatic in 2014 not work in the english speaking market but in the Chinese market Toutiao was a massive success for bytedance? What is the difference that makes it so hard for news apps to work in the English market?

I bet China makes it really easy to sell to a big, unified market since the levels of social repression and form-fitting are much higher compared to other parts of the world. It's easy to sell the party bulletin when nothing else is allowed to circulate :^) Also, the anglosphere consists of many diverse groups of people due to its role as a universal second language. That might make a generalized approach fail with a lot of customers.

You don’t really know anything about China. Unless you are directly criticizing the government it’s just like anywhere else.

And what does “anywhere else” mean here?

You are so correct. The only thing different about China is government oppression and nothing else. You cannot make omelets without cracking a few fake eggs.

Directly criticizing the government is basically the national sport in most western countries.

Because China leapfrogged over the early internet era. In the West traditional publishers have strong brands and independent digital presences, mentally everything is a 'website' not a 'app'. It's also why traditional search is much more popular in the West than in China. In the West the internet is an open protocol where independent institutions publish their own information still. Things are indexable, locatable, and so on.

Chinese users grew up on everything being app content, traditional media is just an input like any other that agglomerators consume and then present algorithmically to users, everything is completely mixed between user generated content and news stories and there's no particular notion of news or journalism as a distinct entity.

This is purely from my experience with friends/family/coworkers so it may not be the real reason. I've experienced that most people in America focus on one news source (this is primarily the older market), or they are fully agnostic in their sources and get their news from social media and Twitter/X (the younger market).

Services like Artifact, which show news articles from a variety of sources do not mesh well with either of these larger markets. An older market who prefers their singular news source does not want to read news from anyone they don't trust. And the younger market aren't fans of specifically just reading news. It's usually peppered in with posts from friends, or it's trending and has a large discussion on Twitter/X.

So the market becomes limited to people who get their news from various sources and prefer absorbing their news at specific times and in specific ways. In the American market, I believe it's just too small of a market to become profitable.

Thank you for mentioning prismatic! It was awesome. They just couldn't monetize it, if memory serves.

They made the unconventional choice of using Clojure: https://github.com/plumatic

Because the state of news sites on the English web in 2024 is that they’re ad-infested garbage experiences that introduce themselves by begging for your email address and requesting permission to set tracking cookies, or they’re paywalled, or they do all of the above!

You can aggregate as much shit as you want but unless you’re using it to manufacture fertilizer it’s still just shit, and that’s before even going into the content of what passes as news nowadays.

Props to the founders for trying, but news is a bad business that is already very crowded, so I'm not super surprised.

> The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app.

Unless you’re doing your own journalism, you can only curate and paraphrase other news sources, right? Social media takes care of that, at least if you find and follow good curators, but this app’s recommendation system is unlikely to be better than social media’s.

I’d you are doing your own journalism, good for you. But unfortunately that’s very hard especially if it’s not local (and if it is local, good for you again. Boston Globe is somewhat an example of this, perhaps unsurprisingly it’s very expensive for news).

Artifact had potential, but it didn't quite meet my expectations due to an overload of random news articles. I believe the future of news aggregators lies in their ability to synthesize content. Have you checked Debriefs AI ?(https://debriefs.ai). They allow users to curate their favorite newsletters and sources into unique workspaces. The standout feature for me is its capability to create key insights with AI, which can be tailored to the frequency of my choosing. If you're in search of a customized news experience, Debriefs AI is a service I highly recommend.

This bums me out. Artifact was actually enjoyable to use, and the social commenting on news often had very sane and normal commentary to it.

Anyone know any good alternatives? I tried Ground News at launch and found it far too chaotic though I like the novelty of the unbiased model

HackerNews is the only lightweight news site I’ve found that remotely scratches that “sane commentary” itch for me. I wish there were alternatives for more local events or even world news. I can’t watch any mainstream media these days which tends to lean heavily into pitting people against each other with dehumanizing vitriol and force-fed host opinions.

I spent an hour yesterday after this announcement installing and trying out various options. Feedly and Inoreader seem the most promising, in terms of having good interface and dark mode with no ads in articles.

Both seem to require way too much effort to get a good feed together, though, and neither has artifact's killer AI clickbait replacement feature.

That's really sad, the enjoyed opening the app sometimes.

I wish Artifact didn't have the infinite scroll of news. I would have preferred just seeing the latest news and then stop, not allow me to see news from 2 months ago.

Some categories were also lacking and consisted of mostly low-effort articles. I thought the Ai would have gotten rid of those based on my effort of blocking them, or marking them as not interesting, but the Ai was still pushing them into my view.

Adding streaks was a misstake in my opinion, as someone else mentioned, Artifact sometimes went against their purpose of the app.

Otherwise, I thought the app had a lot of potential. Had they only integrated more local news, I would have used it a lot more!

People want to choose their sources and follow niche topics that are relevant to them. Until recently, none of the apps on the market could facilitate this. However, I discovered Debriefs AI (https://debriefs.ai), which allows you to create workspaces that track your newsletters and sources. It then builds key insights at the frequency you prefer. I highly recommend it.

It was ad-revenue supported I presume?

It's always that and/or user data.

I hope we soon learn and grow as a society to understand the externalized costs of allowing cheap-shallow ads, that do far more than waste time and attention, aren't acceptable - are easily net harmful.

I tried it and generally liked it. It learned to mostly send me articles about food and new restaurants, which made me happy. Unfortunately, I forgot about it and stopped checking it months ago, so I suppose that I was part of the problem. Sad to see it go.

I hadn't heard of this app. Seems like they're shutting down very quickly. No pivot or anything. Strange.

I can't resist and say that Kevin Systrom had more luck than skill in his success with Instagram. Yes he is smart and yes he is Stanford graduate but c'mon he said that he didn't know what AWS is at the time when he started Instagram....that's just unbelievable tbh.

At what year did he start Instagram? Was AWS even a thing before Instagrams existence?

Yea it was, because cloud was a buzzword at the time and everybody was doing it(Amazon first then Google and Microsoft followed).

In 2009, Larry Ellison(Oracle founder) was making fun of cloud[0] because everyone was on a cloud hypetrain.

[0] https://youtu.be/rmrxN3GWHpM?t=2753

This became my primary newsreader outside NYT. I’ll be sad to see it go.

I tried it a few months ago and most of the articles it linked me to or suggested were paywalled, each with their own subscriptions. In Apple News, you pay one subscription and get all of them unlocked. It was a no-brainer which reader to use.

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