Image credits: artifact
artifactInstagram, the news aggregator turned social network whose founders turned it into a social network, is shutting down.On Friday, the startup announced via blog post The company had made the decision to “wind down” the app, which was released more than a year ago, saying the market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment.
From news browsing apps like SmartNews to curation and news discovery platforms that allow individual users to become creators of sorts, the team iterates quickly on products to create interesting gems that others can like and comment on. Found it on the web. We also employed several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines, and surface the best content. But the series of changes has probably diluted the product’s original value, which was a simple news app that could take on the likes of services built into users’ phones, like Apple News. Sho. The end result is more of a Twitter replacement. However, there are many competitors in this market. That includes his Instagram of Meta, who actually launched Threads, a Twitter/X competitor.
This blog post, written by Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, notes that recognizing market realities is something startups often fail to do, but that “the sooner you make difficult decisions, the better for everyone involved.” That’s it,” he wrote.
“The biggest opportunity cost is time to work on something newer, bigger, and better that can reach millions of people,” Systrom writes. “Personally, I’m excited to keep creating new things, but only time will tell what that will look like. “We live in exciting times and the opportunities for new ideas seem endless,” he said.
To give users time to transition, the app will begin by shutting down various features, including the ability to comment and post. This helps reduce moderation efforts. Existing posts will remain visible for now, and Artifact will continue to operate his “core news features” until the end of February.
The closure comes amid increased competition in Twitter’s rival landscape as well as a slowdown in the use of other news aggregators such as SmartNews. The latter year, 2023, was a tough year, with personnel cuts and a CEO change, but at the same time, the number of app downloads and active users was decreasing. The rise of AI is also changing the way users find news and information. At the same time, publishers are realizing that their content is wrapped in AI training data and queried by users of bots like OpenAI ChatGPT, leading to lawsuits in some cases and licensing agreements in others. It may also lead to.
In Artifact’s case, it wasn’t yet clearly defined what it wanted to be: a Twitter-like conversation and discovery platform, a Pinterest rival for discovering interesting links, or an AI-powered news engine. You may have missed an opportunity to grab the user’s attention because they didn’t know how the app fit into their normal workflow.
Despite the closure, Systrom said news and information “remains an important area for startup investing” and that he believes other “bright minds” are working on ideas in this area. .
The co-founders spoke about the role of AI in Artifact at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this fall. A video of that talk can be found below.