Artifact, the social network turned news aggregator by the founders of Instagram, is shutting down. On Friday, the startup announced via blog post had made the decision to “shut down operations” on the app it launched more than a year ago, saying the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to justify continued investment.
The team had quickly iterated their product from a SmartNews-style news reader app to a news curation and discovery platform where individual users could become creators of a genre, finding interesting gems from around the web that others could like and comment on. It also used several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines and display the best content. However, the flurry of changes had perhaps detracted from the original value of the product, which was a simple news app that could receive the built-in offers on users’ phones, like Apple News. The end result was something more akin to a Twitter replacement — but that’s a market with numerous competitors, including, in fact, Meta’s Instagram, which launched a Twitter/X rival called Threads.
In the blog post, written by Instagram and Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom, he writes that recognizing market realities is something that startups often fail to do, but “making the tough call sooner is better for everyone who take part”.
“The biggest opportunity cost is time spent working on newer, bigger, and better things that have the capacity to reach many millions of people,” Systrom writes. “I’m personally excited to keep building new things, although only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing almost everything we touch and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless,” he said.
To give users time to transition, the app will begin by shutting down various features, such as the ability to comment and post. This will help reduce moderation efforts. Existing posts will remain visible for now, and Artifact will continue to operate in its “core news capability” until the end of February.
The shutdown comes amid increased competition in Twitter’s competitive landscape, but also a slowdown in the use of other news aggregators such as SmartNews. The latter had a rough 2023, with layoffs and a replacement of its CEO, while its app is losing downloads and active users. In part, the way users find news and information is changing with the arrival of AI. At the same time, publishers are discovering that their content has been packaged in AI training data, which is then queried by bot users like OpenAI ChatGPT — leading to lawsuits in some cases and licensing deals in others.
For Artifact, he hadn’t defined exactly what he wanted it to be—a Twitter-style conversation and discovery platform, a Pinterest rival for discovering interesting links, or an AI news engine. This may have resulted in a missed opportunity to capture users’ attention, as users did not know how the app would fit into their normal workflows.
Despite the shutdown, Systrom says news and information “remains critical areas for startup investment” and that he believes other “bright minds” are working on ideas in this area.
The co-founder talked about AI’s role at Artifact at last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. A video of this speech is below.
