Artifact: network failed when trying to be ‘TikTok of texts’ – 01/25/2024 – #Hashtag

In January 2023, Instagram founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom launched the Artifact social network. The platform consisted of a feed of news and texts selected by artificial intelligence, which would be shaped according to the user’s use and interest.

“Discover interesting articles and stay on top of important headlines. Artifact is a free app that learns your interests and brings you the best articles the web has to offer. We make it easy to follow the things you’re interested in while filtering out the noise “, was the announcement at the time of launch.

On Friday, January 12, in a post on Medium, CEO Kevin Systrom announced the end of the tool. The definitive closure of news curation will last until the end of February.

“We built something that a group of users love, but we concluded that the market opportunities are not large enough to warrant investment,” he wrote.

O #Hashtag Below we analyze some errors that led to the early end of the application.

“TikTok of texts”

The duo bet everything on the ability of artificial intelligence to deliver to users what they would like to read. Therefore, it ended up being known as “TikTok of texts”. The Chinese network has an extremely powerful recommendation system, For You. After that, other networks, such as Instagram, improved their artificial intelligence mechanisms.

However, any product that turns out to be “new” something carries a responsibility that is practically irreplicable — just as there has never been a new Pelé in football.

News market

In the age of X (formerly Twitter) microtexts and short TikTok videos, recommending news is entering completely different terrain. Professional journalism is different since the internet, with strong competition from Google and social networks. Influencers and content producers removed the monopoly on information distribution from press outlets.

Systrom and Krieger are experts in building social networks — having founded a network like Instagram is for few. But in the news market they are inexperienced, as they somewhat recognized when they said that “the market opportunities are not large enough to warrant investment”.

The giant Google

Over the past two decades, vehicles have become increasingly dependent on Google as a source of traffic. Users were abandoning the habit of opening a homepage to search for news on Google. The technology giant, aware of this, has invested in recent years in improving its news recommendations on smartphones.

Google News even has recommendations based on the user’s interest in the “For you” tab. In other words, exactly what Artifact wanted to create from scratch, while Google is visited almost 90 billion times a month, according to Similarweb.

Age of artificial intelligence

Since the ChatGPT boom at the end of 2022, most sectors of the economy have tried, in some way, to incorporate artificial intelligence into their routines. However, the era of AI is just beginning, and most of the services and products being launched now will fall by the wayside. And Systrom and Krieger know this, so much so that Systrom wrote on Medium: “We live in an exciting time when artificial intelligence is changing everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.”

Success twice

The two entrepreneurs are in a dilemma. On the one hand, the world of technology is full of stories of those who sometimes fail before achieving success. On the other hand, they have already created one of the biggest successes in the history of social networks, Instagram, and it is very rare for lightning to strike twice in the same place.

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, says so. He has been trying to launch the metaverse for a few years, but until now he continues to be known as the founder of Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp, which belong to Meta, were acquisitions, and their merit was having snapped them up when they were threats.

Another example of this universe is that of Turkish engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, who created Orkut in 2004, in an experimental project when he worked at Google. He has been trying for years to create a “new Orkut”, but no project has caught on.

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