Artifact, the news aggregator-turned social network from Instagram’s founders, is shutting down. On Friday, the startup announced via a blog post it had made the decision to “wind down operations” of the app launched over a year ago, saying that the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to warrant continued investment.
The team had rapidly iterated on its product from a SmartNews-like news reading app to a curation and news discovery platform where individual users could become creators of a sort, finding interesting gems from around the web that others could like and comment on. It also employed several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines and surface the best content. However, the slate of changes had perhaps diluted the original value of the product, which was a simple news app that could take on the likes of built-in offerings 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 has launched a Twitter/X rival called Threads.
Read more at: techcrunch
Curated by Arun