We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.
Kevin Systrom
I could have told you that a year ago, Kevin… Most of what I wrote back then as the app was gearing up for launch has been confirmed after I started using it.
The recommendation algorithm was weaker than Google News in my opinion, serving me predominantly either news about movies and celebrities I don’t especially care about, or headlines I already saw elsewhere. Despite its numerous woes, Twitter still manages to surface content I find relevant and insightful, which rarely happened on Artifact. On some level it’s understandable as I’ve been on Twitter for more than a decade, enough time for its algorithm to learn my interests inside and out.
This highlights a side issue with new apps and services promising improved recommendations: for their algorithms to have good results, they either need access to historical data on your personal interests (something no competitor would share without compensation and would break privacy expectations and regulations as well), or to convince users to shift most of their consumption to the new app (very hard to achieve without good content, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem). There are rare exceptions such as TikTok, which arguably has created an entirely new market and grabbed the top spot in the process.
The Artifact app was rather slow to load articles, even on a fairly recent Android phone (I upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S22 early last year), and of course it displayed ads embedded on websites, which did nothing to improve the overall experience. I enjoyed Circa much more, and its concept was at least fresh and innovative. Artifact unfortunately felt like a mediocre attempt to take on Google – or Apple – News that failed to live up to its promises.
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