Artifact — the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence — is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.
The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.
TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.
Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing, but for text.
Casey Newton
I saw that shift and I was like, oh, that’s the future of social, Systrom said.These unconnected graphs; these graphs that are learned rather than explicitly created. And what was funny to me is as I looked around, I was like, man, why isn’t this happening everywhere in social? Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook?
Interesting concept; it seems Twitter’s turbulent present and uncertain future are opening up niches for competitors. I would certainly love a valid alternative to Twitter for news discovery, as Mastodon doesn’t seem that appealing to me – or fit for this purpose.
That being said, news reading apps were fashionable years ago and then… just fizzled out when they couldn’t figure out a business model, or reach a large enough mass of recurring users. It’s too early to judge Artifact’s potential success, but other than the famous names attached to the project, it doesn’t seem to offer much beyond those long-forgotten news apps. In fact, at this point it’s barely Google News with an (unproven) claim of a superior, TikTok-like algorithm. Signups are weirdly tied to phone numbers – since I don’t live in the US I simply assumed I wouldn’t be able to join the waitlist – which also raises question around their inexistent privacy policy.
The reading experience may prove a thorny challenge as well: the app apparently serves articles directly from publishers’ websites, along with their ads and login systems – and presumably paywalls. This provides a fragmented experience, as each site has its distinctive design, but also a frustrating one – we all know how terrible websites have become without an ad blocker. It could also skew the recommendation algorithm in unwanted ways: if people visit a paywalled article in-app and can’t read it (either because they don’t subscribe to that publication, or simply can’t remember their login credentials), the algorithm may interpret their short stay as a lack of interest in the topic or content, and incorrectly adjust future recommendations.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to spend long stretches of time reading articles on a mobile screen. Even on Twitter my preferred workflow is to favorite articles I find in the mobile app and return to them on desktop, either to read them in the browser or to send them for later on my Kindle. If Artifact doesn’t have a way to save articles for later or a regular website I’m afraid it won’t be the right alternative for me.
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