26 ms·

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

455 points by gwill 4y ago

oblib 4y ago
I'm old, so maybe that's why I really can't see why we need or would want a text based "TikTok". EamonnMR already mentioned here "Isn't Twitter tiktok for text already?" I think he nailed it.
- runevault 4y ago
  Which is funny because twitter bought and killed Vine which was well on its way to be Tiktok before Tiktok.
  - theturtletalks 4y ago
    Remember when companies bought small start-ups to bolster innovation instead of faltering it?
  - oblib 4y ago
    That is funny!
gwill 4y ago
it's just a private beta currently(https://artifact.news/ https://artifact.news/), but i'm curious about details around privacy. I have a feeling that given their success selling instagram to facebook they'd lean into data harvesting. maybe i'm being pessimistic though.
mfiguiere 4y ago
ProductHunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/artifact-4 https://www.producthunt.com/products/artifact-4
mfiguiere 4y ago
Kevin's announcement tweet: https://twitter.com/kevin/status/1620466387063042048 https://twitter.com/kevin/status/1620466387063042048
antipotoad 4y ago
Having to give a phone number to join the waitlist is not so nice. Can’t think of any good reason not to accept an email.
- squokko 4y ago
  Easier for one person to spin up 1000 emails than 1000 phone numbers.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I think you mean the other way around?
    - squokko 4y ago
      Yes, edited
  - taftster 4y ago
    Really? That's crazy. At least at one point, spinning up phone numbers was significantly harder and much more deterrent against account generators than was email addresses. What has changed to make phone numbers easier to generate and email addresses harder?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - squokko 4y ago
      Yes I typed it backwards
      - taftster 4y ago
        Ha ha, OK. I totally thought you meant it. I mean, as much spam calls as I get, I honestly wasn't surprised. I'm following now, thank you.
- deleted 4y ago
jonathankoren 4y ago
Bold move to get into news aggregation. Silicon valley is littered with the carcasses of companies that’s tried to make that a business. I’m not really sure enough people care to switch from their existing de facto aggregators, to make it pay through advertising. And news is a free commodity, so there’s not much of a reason for a user to pay for it.
toddmorey 4y ago
I’m perhaps being a poor sport but - give away my phone number - for an AI content app - described as TikTok for text - from the Instagram people - without even a screenshot just all feels horribly unappealing. I don’t know why people will sign up, but I’m obviously not their audience.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I can understand not wanting to interact with a certain company, but I don't get the phone number thing. There used to be books that listed everyone's phone number.
  - pancrufty 4y ago
    Yea but those books just had your name and maybe address. In the current world your number can have your whole life attached, even whether you use a bum gun. It’s not the same
    - sprkwd 4y ago
      Also you could opt out of having your details in the book.
  - shortcake27 4y ago
    It removes the ability to interact with the service anonymously. With a phone number, they know exactly who you are, and when your data is sold it’ll be at your expense.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  - who may well just sell out to Facebook again after a couple of years[1] [1] No shade - if Facebook offered me $billions for my user generated content site, I'd be at the bank quicker than you could imagine but I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me with user content again.
  - makerofspoons 4y ago
tchock23 4y ago
There is a YC startup named Artifact. I wonder if the founders will defend the name like Instagram did with people using ‘gram’ in their name. That would be some nice karma.
- schmorptron 4y ago
  There is also a (failed) card game by valve software of the same name.
  - TillE 4y ago
    I'm still baffled at how that game got almost rebooted and then just abandoned. The game wasn't perfect, the business model was a failed experiment, but it's something they absolutely could have built into something fun, instead of flushing it all down the drain. Online card games are huge. Valve was almost there.
    - schmorptron 4y ago
      Yeah, a real shame. I'll admit though, I'm in the camp that preferred the older version (except for the godawful monetization scheme) to the reboot, but with more development time it probably would've convinced me when it got more polished. But hey, at least you can still play it and all cards are free! now if only they had released the apparently almost finished second set of cards....
- ipsum2 4y ago
  There are 11 startups named "Artifact", and lots more with Artifact in their name (e.g. Artifact Technologies) https://www.crunchbase.com/search https://www.crunchbase.com/search
  - tchock23 4y ago
    Ahh nice catch. Didn’t realize it was such a popular name!
cloudking 4y ago
Sounds similar to https://mywaverly.com/ https://mywaverly.com/
shapefrog 4y ago
Thats what kids want, more reading words.
fatnoah 4y ago
> The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’ I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of things I chose to follow. That's it.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  That’s cool. The engagement metrics show more usage and ad clicks when the feed is ML-driven, so that’s what they’re gonna give you. Thanks for playing.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    "When a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good measure."
  - tormeh 4y ago
    Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the app at all.
    - vonnieda 4y ago
      I don't think this is true. I see "Boosted" posts in my feed from people I don't follow. Maybe this is a server specific feature? I am using Hachyderm.io.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        This is a standard Mastodon feature. You will see post that people you follow "boost", but not things they only "favorite". My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give positive feedback to the post author".
atonse 4y ago
My apologies to the team who I'm sure worked very hard, for sounding very sour. But I just had this visceral reaction to this: Come on guys, all of you smart people working at these places, doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?" Sigh, at least Google in its heyday created the moonshots and was tackling real problems that mattered, self-driving, energy generation, robotics. Not just regurgitating the same old tired "___ but with text" "___ but with 6 second videos" ideas.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  It's interesting that you bring up Google, a company founded to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' Isn't that exactly what Artifact is doing (but instead of rules-based search algorithms, it's using stochastic ML models)? Is the problem that they are comparing themselves to Tik Tok?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- EGreg 4y ago
  I have. I received mostly derision and apathy from 98% of people https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications https://rational.app https://rational.app
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity > posts a link to a crypto ponzi scheme > mostly derision and apathy Gee I wonder why.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Can you please describe how the ponzi scheme works? Seems you can just download open source software and use it without buying any tokens… and even if you did buy tokens, where is the ponzi? Many startups are “almost” ponzi schemes, where money from later stage investors keeps propping up a business that has negative unit economics, offen no revenues. Twitter made zero revenues when it was valued at $100M. Who paid the bills? Twitter has been losing money when Elon’s group bought it. Who’s paying the bills? On the other hand I am giving away software for free, that took 4 years to write, that I paid hundreds of thousands to a team I work with, and took jobs to do it. I give it away for free, you don’t even LOOK at it and call it a ponzi. Yep, my description is accurate. The grandparent commenter asked: doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?" This is why. Capital talks. And capital is invested mostly in bullshit that can produce hype, not open source software that can change the world. People don’t look at substance, they follow trends. I give away software for free that solves the very problems many people on HN are hired to solve for years and people can’t be bothered to look unless there is hype around it first. You have your answer right here.
phailhaus 4y ago
> Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. They just never learn. This will not scale! But they refuse to hand over any control to users for choosing what they want to consume, or providing negative feedback. They're going to make the same mistake that all these platforms have made, which is to treat all content as if it's in one giant bag and hope they can ML their way through. There's no way to subscribe to a "feed" of related content, so your best bet is to follow some creators and hope that The Algorithm gets the message. How do I choose that I want to read more about science today? Or culture? Well, my only option is to hope that their ML team is good enough to maintain a reasonable ontology of subjects and good at classifying content automatically. But I'm completely out of luck if I have niche interests.
yz_coding 4y ago
Isn't this essentially TouTiao?
- huffmsa 4y ago
  Yes, though most westerners don't know anything but TikTok out of byte dance
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  And TouTiao is like the algo-ranked news apps already used in the USA except it's way more stuffed with video clips and gossip.
asim 4y ago
The feed is one of the most dangerous inventions of modern times and now we're making it even more addictive. I really hope we stop to think about this at some point and realise we need to break away from this consumption format.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Do we do this with regulation? Or education? Trusting businesses to not do whatever they can to make money isn't a plausible strategy. People who can avoid social media will surpass their peers who are logging hours of mindless screen time. That will ultimately encourage even more inequality as people (especially kids) who aren't actively guided will easily fall into the social media trap and get left behind. Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers?
  - smolder 4y ago
    > Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers? That's past, present, and future, though the pacification is never quite perfect, because the separation between groups isn't. Achievers and pacified overlap in the same pool, which is why I think generally we should all piss in it less.
jollyllama 4y ago
Great, more name collisions for "artifact repository", "artifact generation", etc.
philip1209 4y ago
Consumer businesses are hard. Bootstrapping a network is hard. Taking attention away from competing apps is hard. Dealing with skeptics is hard. Yet, this team is one of the few that have succeeded at all of these challenges before. I'm excited to watch how they build this business. Success is uncertain, but observing their actions will be a case study in growth tactics.
- baxtr 4y ago
  I agree. But I would like to add: ANY business is hard. Not only B2C.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Are social media apps/platforms really B2C? Aren't they more B2B?
    - hackitup7 4y ago
      They're fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy. I won't say trivial, but I would guess literally 2-3 orders of magnitude easier if you have a large and engaged audience. B2C success is the rate-limiting step.
      - mritchie712 4y ago
        Agreed, the b2b part is simple. It's a lot of work, but it's something you can hire people to do and follow a playbook. There's no playbook you can run to make a social app go viral.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy Social media is neither. Ben Thompson's aggregator aside from the B2C/B dichotomy shines in this example. Snap and Twitter notoriously struggled with ad sales, for example.
recuter 4y ago
I wish Andrew Mason would come back.
pryelluw 4y ago
So, Reddit?
cyral 4y ago
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that this isn't a bad idea. Mobile Chrome has a similar feature that shows recommended articles on the new tab page, and it is surprisingly good at learning the topics you are into (from searches obviously). I often find new and interesting articles on there, similar to how TikTok manages to know what you like but also tries to give you new topics occasionally. This could introduce people to a lot of content that they otherwise wouldn't discover.
- ghostly_s 4y ago
  I think calling it "TikTok for text" is the bad idea. Sounds like it's focused on traditional long-form writing not short-form content. The only part of TikTok they're trying to emulate is a recommendation algorithm that doesn't suck (and which every social media site should be trying to do).
- leonidasv 4y ago
  I always get clickbait Medium articles and SEO garbage on my Mobile Chrome homepage. There's interesting content sometimes, sure, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very bad. I try to teach the algorithm by dismissing those low-quality posts, but they keep appearing.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    I am starting to think the amount of worthwhile content produced is just insufficient.
- spookybones 4y ago
  I like Chrome's recommended articles, which I've only recently started using. But, I already notice a significant filter bubble.
- maxamillion2020 4y ago
  It would be far better if instead of news it did short stories (like sci-fi, or fantasy or romance).
- 4y ago
xnx 4y ago
Tiktok's features expand faster than other sites can copy them (successfully at least). In the past few months image slideshows (often heavy with text) have become a popular format on TikTok. I see no reason why TikTok wouldn't be the TikTok for text.
- claytonjy 4y ago
  If they get banned in the US that's a solid moat for Artifact.
vagabund 4y ago
Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app. It's like a drink after work. Copy-pasting that logic to longform text misses the differences in the mediums, and how people interact with them. When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated. And part of being thoughtful is consciously choosing what to read. One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated Twitter.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    To add: > The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like The New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Not Twitter but many of these articles already have headlines catered to a certain method of consumption (aggregation done by Reddit, HN, etc.). I didn't need to read this article to know that Instagram's co-founders are making TikTok for text!
  - montagg 4y ago
    And TikTok. It really depends what Tok you end up on, but there's plenty of corners of TikTok that are exactly the same mechanics as Twitter: quick bursts of infuriation that activate you and leave you wanting more. I think it's easier for a video-based content network like this (these are not social networks) to have content where you turn off your brain, like TV, than it would be with text. But they both can and are incentivized to do the same thing: titillate.
    - jamescostian 4y ago
      I'd argue that text has an advantage over video: speed of skipping past content you don't want. People don't talk anywhere near as fast as they skim headlines You're right about turning off your brain. But not everyone wants that thing turned off
nfRfqX5n 4y ago
interesting concept, but news? is that something people want more of?
- mdwalters 4y ago
  Very good resource for seeing what's happening around the world
crossroadsguy 4y ago
> A personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence Right! Then “enter your phone number”. These people are probably jumping on the next bandwagon? I recently saw something like this — I think it was post.news or so. Is it a new trend these days?
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Post was a Twitter clone. Not a very good one either, I'm afraid. Isn't Twitter tiktok for text already?
  - shusaku 4y ago
    The difference is every time you login into twitter and see your feed was set to algorithmic, you groan and switch it back to chronological. This app won’t let you switch it back.
razzimatazz 4y ago
How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my feed on your posts?
- cloudking 4y ago
  Maybe you could use all the HN links you comment on and upvote as signals, classify the links into categories, then surface new links from those categories in a "for you" personalized HN feed. You probably need more signals to make it work well, like how much time you spend looking at those links.
forgetcolor 4y ago
More accurate would be to call it TikTok for Links, not for text, as text without links isn't allowed.
mbesto 4y ago
> TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world. Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing but for text. Ummm, one huge glaring difference - TikTok's content is user generated, Artifact's is not. Why this is being compared to TikTok is beyond me...
galleywest200 4y ago
Cool -- how do I get my blogs to be picked up by their algorithm?
calo_star 4y ago
Sounds like Xiaohongshu without pictures to me.
hasbot 4y ago
Meh, I'll stick with Reddit and HN.
sethd 4y ago
Hopefully we haven’t entered a “TikTok for X” phase in tech journalism.
karaterobot 4y ago
Someday they'll cut creation out of the loop and just train a model to consume your list of liked Tweets and generate more tweetlike text objects that resemble them. Then you'll just an endless feed of complete trash you can scroll down for the rest of your life.
imaginationra 4y ago
[flagged]
beauHD 4y ago
Another reason to use RSS. I am skeptical of something whose founders make money by mining users' data. This is yet another attempt to mine your data and reading habits, and there's many successful attempts at that already (Evernote, Pocket, Kindle, etc). I'm tired of these apps who nose around in your reading, and I don't care if it's powered by AI. AI will never replace the serendipitous scrolling I do with my RSS client.
- raman162 4y ago
  I'm a big fan of RSS but RSS limits you to what you already have subscribed to. I think mining user data has become the unfortunate norm but there trying to provide more relevant content here so that's understandable. I'm curious to see how well this type of recommendation works in comparison to community based sites like hacker news and reddit.
  - rambambram 4y ago
    > but RSS limits you to what you already have subscribed to Not if every website with a feed also shares their subscribed feeds. Like with an OPML file, which was already used as a feedlist exchange format. I aim to create this with my Really Social Sites software. And I'm always curious to scroll through someone else's meaningful lists of shared links. So if anyone cares to share their OPML file or list of interesting bookmarks, please reply.
    - Y_Y 4y ago
      I'd be interested to see what you already have. If you really want a pile of interesting bookmarks I bet a lot of people here (including me) could give you some and it might be worth making a whole new discussion (vía e.g. Show HN) for it.
      - rambambram 4y ago
        Not that much right now, but you can see a small list at the bottom of my company's website (see profile). Look for the text "You might also like ...". It's mostly sites/feeds that were already featured on HN somewhere in the last year. I was thinking of asking HN for lists of interesting bookmarks (or even OPML files) to share. I guess a lot of people here have interesting hobbies other than tech!
theGnuMe 4y ago
Wasn't there a version of this in China that was the inspiration for TikTok?
rcarr 4y ago
Over the past month I've started using RSS through a combination of ReadKit and Feedibin for everything I possibly can. YouTube videos, Reddit, Twitter, News Websites, Blogs, Newsletters. All of it, RSS. And it is absolutely fucking awesome. Some pertinent points: - My news addiction has dramatically declined in less than two weeks. I have a Feedbin action which automatically sets everything from Reddit, Hacker News, and news websites as read. I also utilise the Smart Folder functionality of ReadKit to exclude the same websites from the Today folder. This means I can click on these feed and have a look through it at my leisure but there's no pressure to 'get caught up' on everything. - As a result of the above, I am a lot more focussed and present and I am getting more shit done. I am wasting way less time mindlessly browsing low quality content and doomscrolling. - I no longer have to deal with a bunch of ads, cookie requests, email subscription popups and whatever else junk that is bringing the internet to the point where it's unusable. - Managing my email is now a joy. The only thing that goes there is correspondence, invoices and important account information. I've been unsubscribing to everything else as it comes in and keeping subscriptions to the newsletters I want to keep using the email address provided by Feedbin. - I use hnrss to handle hacker news and have a feed set up for replies to my comments which means I engage with people on this site better. I also have Front Page, Ask HN, Best Comments, Active etc all under one HN tag in Feedbin. I'm finding scrolling through this a better experience than just checking the Front Page, or the tabs separately. - I'm reading way more varied and better quality materials from individuals, blogs and specialist magazines rather than mainstreams journalists pushing politics and agendas. - As a result of all the above, the internet is FUN again. It feels like I've time travelled back 20 years to when the internet was full of unique and quirky webpages and you never knew what you was going to find. In reality it's been there the entire time, but social media, mainstream media, search engines and other massive corporations have pushed it out of site and sent me to sleep in order to earn money and purse their own agendas. Well, I am awake again and I will not be going back. And hopefully comments like this will help wake up others. You have to spend a little bit of time setting everything up and a few minutes each week tweaking things to keep it organised but it is absolutely worth the effort and the extra cost for the services.
- rambambram 4y ago
  Cool, I'm in the process of doing the same. The 'regular' social media is already out of the window, but Youtube is pulling hard on me. Time to transfer some channels to my RSS reader, I guess. First, it was hard. My daily dopamine shots ended abruptly while browsing purely through RSS feeds. One thing I wish more sites/feeds did, was adding images to the posts. I started practicing what I preach by building dedicated 'photo feeds'.
rchaud 4y ago
Wow, another walled-garden mobile app to fill your screen with algorithmically ordered blogspam. The article says it's "like Google Reader" except for the part where Google reader didn't take the liberty of filling your feed for you.
- jamiequint 4y ago
  [flagged]
ndneighbor 4y ago
Return of the king vibes here :) I am hoping this product really takes off. I do kinda see how this can fit the niche of a social RSS + recommendations.
msikora 4y ago
Wasn't this done already a few times? Mobile app only? Phone number to sign up??? Like "TikTok"???? Hard pass...
oblib 4y ago
"Tiktok for literate people?" got flagged? Come on... that seems a bit heavy handed.
- imaginationra 4y ago
  Yeah, seems a bit heavy handed and humorless around here 0_0
nikolay 4y ago
There's Twitter. There's Tumblr. There's Gab. There's Truth Social. There's Parler. There's GETTR. And we now have a decent Mastodon! Enough is enough! Stop fragmenting!
jwmoz 4y ago
An algorithmic echo chamber.
goldenchrome 4y ago
> and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to take a run at text-based social networking again. In what way has Twitter collapsed? This sounds highly political. Which of course it is, because “a feed of text posts” is in no way innovative. The innovation is in the selective censorship. Orwellian.
nickrubin 4y ago
Personalized news aggregators are "TikTok for text" now?
kyle-rb 4y ago
This could be cool if they source articles and blog posts from random places across the web, like StumbleUpon but with the modern ML that "works scarily well". Could be great for discoverability of smaller sites. Hopefully at some point they'll let me sign up with an email address though because I refuse to sign in with a phone number on principle.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
The future of social is fake people? I mean, they are right.
nilespotter 4y ago
Well, their first effort had such a positive impact on society... if they strike lightning twice it'll be Mad Max in no time.
stonogo 4y ago
> A personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence I remember when this was called Pressflip, and when that was called Persai. https://venturebeat.com/business/persai-a-personalized-online-news-aggregator/ https://venturebeat.com/business/persai-a-personalized-onlin...
RC_ITR 4y ago
Just to add context for anyone who doesn't know the history - Bytedance's first product was Toutiao, which means 'headlines' [0]. Douyin/Tik Tok grew out of that. The concept works well one a relatively homogeneous Internet like the one found in China, but I can see a lot of reasons why Western users who are used to more control via search and full data access wouldn't like it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao
- vernon99 4y ago
  Came here to say that. This is essentially Toutiao and this a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt. And indeed, why won’t people like an essentially an amazing text based recommendation system? Btw it was valued at 20b in 2017. So yeah no joke. Edit: typos
  - thundergolfer 4y ago
    Toutiao has loads of short video content, it's not really a text-dominated app. It launched its video channel in mid-2015.
    - vernon99 4y ago
      By then it already had 25m DAU and next year its revenue was 1b already. So yes it's content agnostic, but it started and rapidly grew as a text based aggregator with a strong recommendation system. From what I heard, TikTok's recommendation system is based on that and that was used to explain its ballistic growth.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt. I’d be careful with this type of thinking. Sometimes things can just be different. Take KOLs/live-streaming e-commerce for example. Works in China for a lot of reasons (they’re the worlds most populous time zone for example), but it comes off as a negative utility interaction for Westerners (why is a pretty girl begging me to buy tires?). Again, a lot of the differences are culture, especially in terms of China’s relatively controlled internet vs. the West’s relative free for all.
jms703 4y ago
It's hard enough to be selective with your choices of media. Having an algorithm shove media down your throat in a way that teaches blindly ignore the source seems like a bad idea...or a good idea, depending on who you are.
amelius 4y ago
Like Medium?
mseepgood 4y ago
How does one do those silly dances in text?
jiggywiggy 4y ago
It's wild people are still trying this. We were making these news aggragation websites 10 years ago all the time. There is even a Quora question about it I'm 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startups-failed https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu... There was one pretty big one that failed, anyone remember the name? I don't think the tech changed that much, also were using bunch of machine learning recommendation algorithms at the time. If anyone can pull it off its probably them, good luck to them.
- jimhi 4y ago
  What are you referring to?
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    It was easy to build and was a hype at the time. Many devs gave it a shot. See Quora in 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startups-failed https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu...
- gammarator 4y ago
  I enjoyed prismatic back in the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795198
imaginationra 4y ago
TikTok for human artifacts that still retain an attention span and the ability to read something more than a headline.
college_physics 4y ago
Despite all qualms about privacy, ai manipulation, walled gardens etc (concerns which obviously dont carry much currency in certain circles) it would be a positive signal if this catches on. It would disprove the hypothesis that social media have gained popularity by increasingly dumbing down the main type of content. Long form text definitely would be a reversal of that trend.
fleddr 4y ago
News articles and the discussions surrounding them is what's made Facebook insufferable and Twitter the epicenter of the culture wars. I know, blame the culture or political landscape, not the app. But it is going to be your problem. And it's a big problem. Best of luck.
twelve40 4y ago
> Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook? because I really really want to just follow my friends? and not get random crap shoved in my face? please?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
numair 4y ago
Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, which anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and ended up lost in randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API. Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits.
numair 4y ago
Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, as anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and then ended up lost in memes and randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API. Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits. Or are they still in denial?
jay-barronville 4y ago
I'm curious to see how this plays out. I signed up. That said . . . > a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends Am I the only one who sees these platforms that curate content based on existing interests as a dangerous trend for our society? Here's what I mean: I used to be somewhat of a far-leftist. I'm far from that now, but looking back, I think one of the reasons why I held some of the unreasonable/divisive views I held was due to the invisible bubbles I was stuck in. These bubbles were powered and reinforced by my social media networks (especially Facebook). These platforms effectively help turn so many of us into ideologues rather than critical and independent thinkers. It's been many years now since I last had an active social media account and I lean more conservative now, but I'm very fearful of bubbles. I think they're dangerous and hold folks captive to one-dimensional perspectives, not to mention enabling extremism on all ends of the political spectrum. Because of this, I intentionally make sure my circle of friends is as diverse as possible (including everything from socialists to libertarians to hardcore conservatives). Even though I'm conservative now, I still study the leftist perspectives of different issues to make sure I come to what I consider the best conclusions possible without being subconsciously coerced into any conclusions due to being stuck in a bubble.
- pm 4y ago
  Absolutely: ideas reinforce if you're around them long enough. I don't think it was Facebook's intention for echo chambers to occur, but it was too profitable for them to stop it once it had.
mdwalters 4y ago
apparently you can use a disposable phone number to join the waitlist
ALittleLight 4y ago
I was feeling very good about this idea until I read - "Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality" Maybe I'm missing something or not understanding how the app actually works, but restricting publishers by quality standards seems like the opposite of TikTok's approach. TikTok's appeal for creators is that it's very easy to grow an audience. For the consumers - one appeal is that you're seeing "real" or amateur content, not the produced mainstream thing. Put another way - I can already consume mainstream outlets, I need a better to get independent voices. In my view they should ban racist and hateful stuff, because that would be a huge turnoff to most users, but other than that - try to be hands off in terms of moderation.
gnicholas 4y ago
I thought about building a text-only social network recently. The trouble is that engagement comes from getting people to keep scrolling, and this is much easier with videos and photos than text. I wish them the best of luck, and hope that they can build something that encourages more thoughtfulness. I also hope they don't become too censorious... > Both left- and right-leaning publishers were included; you’ll find Fox News there, for example. But Systrom isn’t shy about the fact that the company will be exercising its own judgment about who belongs and who doesn’t.
user_named 4y ago
So it's actually no like TikTok. It's like Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which is the algorithmic news app that came before tiktok and where bytedance built the recommendation engine used in tiktok.
mshake2 4y ago
Do you think successful founders ever get self-conscious and insecure at the idea that their primary success had a lot of luck involved?
royal___ 4y ago
Google has been doing this with their news feed for years, this article makes it sound like some revolutionary idea but it's really not anything new.
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
Do these guys know what ByteDance is lol? They started as a tiktok for text (Toutiao) before expanding into video...
thenerdhead 4y ago
I like this concept and the timing is just about right to be successful too. You can use it in many different ways: - A curated feed by those who you trust to curate quality content (akin to certain twitter users). - A for you feed that helps you curate quality content that you have high engagement with. - No comment sections between you and the content which can alter your perspective prior to reading. - Naturally weeds out the junk that sometimes gets posted in higher quality feeds like HN. - Helps you discover new and budding writers similar to substack.
roughly 4y ago
How on earth do you come out with "Algorithmically curated news feed" in 2023 and think it's a good idea? We didn't know these things were doomsday devices back in 2012, what's their excuse today?
- klabb3 4y ago
  I agree. They’re not even acknowledging the total horror show that public social media has become. Instead they’re leaning into AI and basically telling us that the reason we’re not happy is because of inefficient recommendation systems – a misreading of the room at levels only Bay Area execs can achieve. People’s contempt for these platforms rose proportionally to the amount of agency that these opaque recommendation engines removed. If you want to innovate in this space, you have to change the game entirely. Perhaps it means exposing the parameters for “discovery” to let the users be in control. Perhaps it’s finding alternative revenue sources, so that the users become customers. Perhaps it’s about changing fundamentally how moderation, visibility and trust works. Taking an idea from 2010 and putting a GPT sticker on it ain’t it.
  - mliker 4y ago
    People’s contempt rose because the media painted these platforms to be “evil”.
    - smolder 4y ago
      Media painted these platforms to be "evil" because they chose to be "evil." It wasn't for no reason.
- mikeiz404 4y ago
  I think they are hoping to moderate content more strictly and select a metric to optimize which (hopefully) better aligns with the individual. > “One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity,” he says. “Right? Just make the hard decision.” > Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. And its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects — as opposed to, say, what generates the most clicks and comments — in an effort to reward more deeply engaging material. But I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off. I think the funding model they settle on will inevitably play the biggest role though.
billiam 4y ago
Wow, I guess PT Barnum was right about never losing money on underestimating the intelligence of people but this really is a new low. If TikTok is selling a video snippet app like smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans then I guess this is putting the smallpox onto whiskey barrels for them. The one thing olds like me still use the Internet for, reading things I want to, why not spend more of my day moving my eyes back and forth over words carefully chosen by machine to trigger dopamine spikes in my head?
wonderwonder 4y ago
So this is twitter but you can only post articles that contain advertisements? And it even gives you an inbox? Maybe the magic is in the algorithm but I am currently not inspired and I really like twitter.
its-summertime 4y ago
Isn't that the exact same thing as, well, Facebook's popular articles or Twitter's popular tweets but as a whole thing? Sounds like it could get killed off by mistake just from a minor feature change of either of those companies.
8en 4y ago
I'm excited about this. Kevin and Mikey are 2 of the most talented product builders out there. And, I miss having a really great go-to news reader app.
gverrilla 4y ago
> “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” he said. Here we can see their concept of quality.. > Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality, he told me. For now, the company won’t disclose every publisher in its system, but you can search for individual outlets within the app. Here they say they will make an effort to maintain quality. Which means: over the roof engagement and sales of advertisement.
deleted 4y ago
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cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Another mobile-only product, like Instagram used to be. I get I must not be the demographic, so I guess I don't matter... but... why? Why do this? I've seen this pattern a few times with things that intend on being new Facebook or Twitter replacements. Product managers / designers making this choice to exclude non-mobile. I not only won't use them (barely use my phone), but I distrust the motives.
rusabd 4y ago
Targeting seems little bit off here, happy to be wrong (people who like to read) Artifact is here (people who don't want to type text to search)
psuresh 4y ago
Artificial fact !?
causality0 4y ago
If an algorithm controls what I read then I will end up reading nothing but what I've read before and puff pieces to validate my preexisting opinions. Fuck that.
politician 4y ago
To close the loop, what this really needs is a GPT-based journalism website.
nowherebeen 4y ago
So this is a newsfeed? I think Hacker News has been doing a good job without AI. You simply need a community. I am not sure turning Facebook's news feed feature into a product is really that innovative. How many reputable news sources are there to supply their feed?
hackernewds 4y ago
So Google News with comments? Or reddit with a different UI?
rahimnathwani 4y ago
This seems like an English version of 今日头条 (Jinri Toutiao), a very popular news feed app that ByteDance made before they launched Douyin/TikTok.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
mgarciaisaia 4y ago
> "Every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly." [Citation needed]
- adql 4y ago
  It's ver simple, they just meant companies selling ads on those platforms, their experience got better
bilater 4y ago
Here for the luddite RSS comments.
est 4y ago
Tiktok was spun-off of Musical.ly, which kids cringe dance with existing tracks. Does such behavior exists for texts? All I can recall is rage comics.
jarjoura 4y ago
The appeal to TikTok isn't just that it zeroes in on my attention, it's that the content is mixed and matched and cross-referenced with each other. So it feels like a special place where you can only find that content. Aggregating news seems, to me at least, not special, and something Google News already does. It "magically" knows what my current interests and shows me lots of sources of that. For everything else, I enjoy the Reddit model. Zeroing in on someone's attention for long form content that looks legitimate also scares me as that's how conspiracy theories spread.
Sunspark 4y ago
I recommend they make a web interface as well. I don't think this app will last long anyway, previous text recommendation apps were bought out.
the100rabh 4y ago
[dead]
plastic3169 4y ago
So much negativity for this in here. Is it a flop? Maybe? Most things are. Can we know it without trying? I don’t think so. Why not just let it run and see the results?
WA 4y ago
Twitter works, because I read information that is NOT distilled by "big media outlets". I wanna hear the voices of indie devs, doctors, researchers etc. I don't need a fancy RSS reader with a sorting algorithm. Unless they make user generated content a priority, this will not succeed.
- atoav 4y ago
  This is what drives me nuts about nearly any social media platform: Give me the stuff I follow in chronological order. If you wanna let me discover new stuff put it in small somewhere to the side. On instagram basically every 3rd post/story is someone who I am not following, who I don't give the slightest shit about or advertisements. This seriously makes me consider leaving the platform all together, just give me one more reason and I am gone. I really wonder if it is possible to develope a decent public platform of any kind under capitalism or if everything is just bound to turn into this.
  - WA 4y ago
    I get the rage and I agree. I prefer it as well. But three points to consider: 1. In Twitter, just create lists instead of following. Strict reverse chronological order with no ads. Or use Mastodon, which has this by default. 2. Most users actually do want curated content and not EVERYTHING. 3. Reverse chronological order is also an algorithm with upsides and downsides. It's not like it is a "pure" thing.
low_tech_love 4y ago
Is it common at all for people who happen to hit gold with one app to actually come back and have other hit apps? I see it all the time that things are advertised as being the next hit app from this or that person and, as far as I remember, it almost never works.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  The first example which comes to mind is Niklas Zennström who first got well-known as the businessman who invested in Kazaa and later founded Skype.
  - djmips 4y ago
    Two pillars of technology today.
    - heywhatupboys 4y ago
      no one uses Skype anymore though
      - sali0 4y ago
        He left out the /s
        heywhatupboys 4y ago
        no one uses Kazaa either, the joke is Skype is even more long gone...
        neuronic 4y ago
        While it might be (way) less popular, Skype still exists. [1] Also: > Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols.[50] Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. [2] [1] https://www.skype.com https://www.skype.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams#Protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams#Protocols
sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
I'm so tried of people building junk to shove random content into people's faces every second of the damn day it's like reading/discovering/studying isn't supposed to be relaxing anymore but noisy and always yelling at you I hate it and the drivel fades from memory to quickly
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Good thing: new app, that might be fun to use (like instagram was) Bad thing: after a year or two, it will be sold to meta/google/someone_like_that and only show ads with a sprinkle of your friends' content inbetween (like instagram is)
RektBoy 4y ago
I hope it will be same OSINT treasure trove like BeReal was (is). Yikes.
seydor 4y ago
So, like HN?
esskay 4y ago
It is quite amazing that with the experience people like these co-founders have that they put that to use creating things that, on the face of it look like fairly obvious flops. It really does highlight just how many people get lucky with one good idea. In addition the AI side of things is enough to turn me off. We've supposedly got AI based recommendations on YouTube, however despite me never showing any interest I still get videos of someone holding up a product with their mouth wide open like a carp, or random minecraft content that I've repeatedly marked as being not interested in.
dt3ft 4y ago
So you need to give up your phone number in order to sign up. Have people really stopped caring about privacy?
substation13 4y ago
I'm excited. Early social networks - before the monetization / KPI / A-B test crowd get to powerful are fun!
melx 4y ago
36 HTTP requests totaling 459kB of random things to render a simple (and single) html input ?? Truly personalized experience.
erikpl 4y ago
Sounds like yet another echo chamber... Will be interesting so see how they plan to tackle the issues of factuality and bias in the articles they feed users (if they plan to address that at all).
fiskeben 4y ago
When you describe your product as "<different product> for <some domain>" you've already failed. When was the last time that worked!
tsylba 4y ago
I love how the word "social" has been preempted to mean the exact opposite of it.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
I think it will be hard for them to compete with Twitter.
Veen 4y ago
I read this article immediately after reading Corey Doctorow's The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok [0]. It's a useful juxtaposition if you're interested in thinking about how Artifact is likely to develop if it gains traction. [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- notjulianjaynes 4y ago
  I love that i clicked this and read: >Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. You’ve read your last complimentary article this month. Subscribe Now. If you're already a subscriber sign in. Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130001322/https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230130001322/https://www.wired...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - graphe 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/mlh24BnhKmo https://youtu.be/mlh24BnhKmo Just read the comments even if you don't watch it. I watched the ad for fun. He makes a video against addictive games sponsored by raid shadow lol.
- creata 4y ago
  I think https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys is the same article, published on Doctorow's website.
TehShrike 4y ago
The value of my feed comes from the reputation that those people have with me. I trust the things most of them share more than I trust twoots from the broader internet, and if they abuse that trust, I unfollow them. If I want a curated list of posts and thoughts from people who don't have a specific reputation with me, I come to HN :-P
alxmng 4y ago
Why even need sources like NYT? Just generate the headlines and articles using ChatGPT perfectly tailored to what you want to hear :)
agentultra 4y ago
Algorithmically curated social media content didn’t work for Facebook. It didn’t work for Twitter. … but maybe it will work for Artifact.
hk1337 4y ago
So, like Twitter with a slight twist on how the feed works?
dragonelite 4y ago
Is this like twitter clone with better recommendations?
jaseemabid 4y ago
This is what I wanted Apple News to be. I wish it would give me a good curated news feed from dozens of sources, and adapt based on feedback. I badly wanted to love it, but no matter how much I tried it ended up looking something like a mix of Buzzfeed and Murdoch propaganda. Happy to see the idea is not dead and new companies are giving it a shot.

455 points by gwill 4y ago

I'm old, so maybe that's why I really can't see why we need or would want a text based "TikTok". EamonnMR already mentioned here "Isn't Twitter tiktok for text already?" I think he nailed it.

runevault 4y ago
Which is funny because twitter bought and killed Vine which was well on its way to be Tiktok before Tiktok.
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  Remember when companies bought small start-ups to bolster innovation instead of faltering it?
- oblib 4y ago
  That is funny!

gwill 4y ago

it's just a private beta currently(https://artifact.news/ https://artifact.news/), but i'm curious about details around privacy. I have a feeling that given their success selling instagram to facebook they'd lean into data harvesting. maybe i'm being pessimistic though.

mfiguiere 4y ago

ProductHunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/artifact-4 https://www.producthunt.com/products/artifact-4

mfiguiere 4y ago

Kevin's announcement tweet: https://twitter.com/kevin/status/1620466387063042048 https://twitter.com/kevin/status/1620466387063042048

antipotoad 4y ago

Having to give a phone number to join the waitlist is not so nice. Can’t think of any good reason not to accept an email.

squokko 4y ago
Easier for one person to spin up 1000 emails than 1000 phone numbers.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I think you mean the other way around?
  - squokko 4y ago
    Yes, edited
- taftster 4y ago
  Really? That's crazy. At least at one point, spinning up phone numbers was significantly harder and much more deterrent against account generators than was email addresses. What has changed to make phone numbers easier to generate and email addresses harder?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - squokko 4y ago
    Yes I typed it backwards
    - taftster 4y ago
      Ha ha, OK. I totally thought you meant it. I mean, as much spam calls as I get, I honestly wasn't surprised. I'm following now, thank you.
deleted 4y ago

jonathankoren 4y ago

Bold move to get into news aggregation. Silicon valley is littered with the carcasses of companies that’s tried to make that a business. I’m not really sure enough people care to switch from their existing de facto aggregators, to make it pay through advertising. And news is a free commodity, so there’s not much of a reason for a user to pay for it.

toddmorey 4y ago

I’m perhaps being a poor sport but - give away my phone number - for an AI content app - described as TikTok for text - from the Instagram people - without even a screenshot just all feels horribly unappealing. I don’t know why people will sign up, but I’m obviously not their audience.

tshaddox 4y ago
I can understand not wanting to interact with a certain company, but I don't get the phone number thing. There used to be books that listed everyone's phone number.
- pancrufty 4y ago
  Yea but those books just had your name and maybe address. In the current world your number can have your whole life attached, even whether you use a bum gun. It’s not the same
  - sprkwd 4y ago
    Also you could opt out of having your details in the book.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  It removes the ability to interact with the service anonymously. With a phone number, they know exactly who you are, and when your data is sold it’ll be at your expense.
zimpenfish 4y ago
- who may well just sell out to Facebook again after a couple of years[1] [1] No shade - if Facebook offered me $billions for my user generated content site, I'd be at the bank quicker than you could imagine but I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me with user content again.
- makerofspoons 4y ago

tchock23 4y ago

There is a YC startup named Artifact. I wonder if the founders will defend the name like Instagram did with people using ‘gram’ in their name. That would be some nice karma.

schmorptron 4y ago
There is also a (failed) card game by valve software of the same name.
- TillE 4y ago
  I'm still baffled at how that game got almost rebooted and then just abandoned. The game wasn't perfect, the business model was a failed experiment, but it's something they absolutely could have built into something fun, instead of flushing it all down the drain. Online card games are huge. Valve was almost there.
  - schmorptron 4y ago
    Yeah, a real shame. I'll admit though, I'm in the camp that preferred the older version (except for the godawful monetization scheme) to the reboot, but with more development time it probably would've convinced me when it got more polished. But hey, at least you can still play it and all cards are free! now if only they had released the apparently almost finished second set of cards....
ipsum2 4y ago
There are 11 startups named "Artifact", and lots more with Artifact in their name (e.g. Artifact Technologies) https://www.crunchbase.com/search https://www.crunchbase.com/search
- tchock23 4y ago
  Ahh nice catch. Didn’t realize it was such a popular name!

cloudking 4y ago

Sounds similar to https://mywaverly.com/ https://mywaverly.com/

shapefrog 4y ago

Thats what kids want, more reading words.

fatnoah 4y ago

> The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’ I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of things I chose to follow. That's it.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
That’s cool. The engagement metrics show more usage and ad clicks when the feed is ML-driven, so that’s what they’re gonna give you. Thanks for playing.
- ProAm 4y ago
  "When a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good measure."
- tormeh 4y ago
  Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the app at all.
  - vonnieda 4y ago
    I don't think this is true. I see "Boosted" posts in my feed from people I don't follow. Maybe this is a server specific feature? I am using Hachyderm.io.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      This is a standard Mastodon feature. You will see post that people you follow "boost", but not things they only "favorite". My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give positive feedback to the post author".

atonse 4y ago

My apologies to the team who I'm sure worked very hard, for sounding very sour. But I just had this visceral reaction to this: Come on guys, all of you smart people working at these places, doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?" Sigh, at least Google in its heyday created the moonshots and was tackling real problems that mattered, self-driving, energy generation, robotics. Not just regurgitating the same old tired "___ but with text" "___ but with 6 second videos" ideas.

RC_ITR 4y ago
It's interesting that you bring up Google, a company founded to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' Isn't that exactly what Artifact is doing (but instead of rules-based search algorithms, it's using stochastic ML models)? Is the problem that they are comparing themselves to Tik Tok?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 4y ago
I have. I received mostly derision and apathy from 98% of people https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications https://rational.app https://rational.app
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity > posts a link to a crypto ponzi scheme > mostly derision and apathy Gee I wonder why.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Can you please describe how the ponzi scheme works? Seems you can just download open source software and use it without buying any tokens… and even if you did buy tokens, where is the ponzi? Many startups are “almost” ponzi schemes, where money from later stage investors keeps propping up a business that has negative unit economics, offen no revenues. Twitter made zero revenues when it was valued at $100M. Who paid the bills? Twitter has been losing money when Elon’s group bought it. Who’s paying the bills? On the other hand I am giving away software for free, that took 4 years to write, that I paid hundreds of thousands to a team I work with, and took jobs to do it. I give it away for free, you don’t even LOOK at it and call it a ponzi. Yep, my description is accurate. The grandparent commenter asked: doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for longer?" This is why. Capital talks. And capital is invested mostly in bullshit that can produce hype, not open source software that can change the world. People don’t look at substance, they follow trends. I give away software for free that solves the very problems many people on HN are hired to solve for years and people can’t be bothered to look unless there is hype around it first. You have your answer right here.

phailhaus 4y ago

> Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. They just never learn. This will not scale! But they refuse to hand over any control to users for choosing what they want to consume, or providing negative feedback. They're going to make the same mistake that all these platforms have made, which is to treat all content as if it's in one giant bag and hope they can ML their way through. There's no way to subscribe to a "feed" of related content, so your best bet is to follow some creators and hope that The Algorithm gets the message. How do I choose that I want to read more about science today? Or culture? Well, my only option is to hope that their ML team is good enough to maintain a reasonable ontology of subjects and good at classifying content automatically. But I'm completely out of luck if I have niche interests.

yz_coding 4y ago

Isn't this essentially TouTiao?

huffmsa 4y ago
Yes, though most westerners don't know anything but TikTok out of byte dance
thundergolfer 4y ago
And TouTiao is like the algo-ranked news apps already used in the USA except it's way more stuffed with video clips and gossip.

asim 4y ago

The feed is one of the most dangerous inventions of modern times and now we're making it even more addictive. I really hope we stop to think about this at some point and realise we need to break away from this consumption format.

ericmcer 4y ago
Do we do this with regulation? Or education? Trusting businesses to not do whatever they can to make money isn't a plausible strategy. People who can avoid social media will surpass their peers who are logging hours of mindless screen time. That will ultimately encourage even more inequality as people (especially kids) who aren't actively guided will easily fall into the social media trap and get left behind. Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers?
- smolder 4y ago
  > Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly pacified low income workers? That's past, present, and future, though the pacification is never quite perfect, because the separation between groups isn't. Achievers and pacified overlap in the same pool, which is why I think generally we should all piss in it less.

jollyllama 4y ago

Great, more name collisions for "artifact repository", "artifact generation", etc.

philip1209 4y ago

Consumer businesses are hard. Bootstrapping a network is hard. Taking attention away from competing apps is hard. Dealing with skeptics is hard. Yet, this team is one of the few that have succeeded at all of these challenges before. I'm excited to watch how they build this business. Success is uncertain, but observing their actions will be a case study in growth tactics.

baxtr 4y ago
I agree. But I would like to add: ANY business is hard. Not only B2C.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Are social media apps/platforms really B2C? Aren't they more B2B?
  - hackitup7 4y ago
    They're fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy. I won't say trivial, but I would guess literally 2-3 orders of magnitude easier if you have a large and engaged audience. B2C success is the rate-limiting step.
    - mritchie712 4y ago
      Agreed, the b2b part is simple. It's a lot of work, but it's something you can hire people to do and follow a playbook. There's no playbook you can run to make a social app go viral.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy Social media is neither. Ben Thompson's aggregator aside from the B2C/B dichotomy shines in this example. Snap and Twitter notoriously struggled with ad sales, for example.

recuter 4y ago

I wish Andrew Mason would come back.

pryelluw 4y ago

So, Reddit?

cyral 4y ago

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that this isn't a bad idea. Mobile Chrome has a similar feature that shows recommended articles on the new tab page, and it is surprisingly good at learning the topics you are into (from searches obviously). I often find new and interesting articles on there, similar to how TikTok manages to know what you like but also tries to give you new topics occasionally. This could introduce people to a lot of content that they otherwise wouldn't discover.

ghostly_s 4y ago
I think calling it "TikTok for text" is the bad idea. Sounds like it's focused on traditional long-form writing not short-form content. The only part of TikTok they're trying to emulate is a recommendation algorithm that doesn't suck (and which every social media site should be trying to do).
leonidasv 4y ago
I always get clickbait Medium articles and SEO garbage on my Mobile Chrome homepage. There's interesting content sometimes, sure, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very bad. I try to teach the algorithm by dismissing those low-quality posts, but they keep appearing.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  I am starting to think the amount of worthwhile content produced is just insufficient.
spookybones 4y ago
I like Chrome's recommended articles, which I've only recently started using. But, I already notice a significant filter bubble.
maxamillion2020 4y ago
It would be far better if instead of news it did short stories (like sci-fi, or fantasy or romance).
4y ago

xnx 4y ago

Tiktok's features expand faster than other sites can copy them (successfully at least). In the past few months image slideshows (often heavy with text) have become a popular format on TikTok. I see no reason why TikTok wouldn't be the TikTok for text.

claytonjy 4y ago
If they get banned in the US that's a solid moat for Artifact.

vagabund 4y ago

Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to shut their brains off when they use the app. It's like a drink after work. Copy-pasting that logic to longform text misses the differences in the mediums, and how people interact with them. When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated. And part of being thoughtful is consciously choosing what to read. One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the experience from devolving into lowest common denominator clickbait.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated Twitter.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  To add: > The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like The New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Not Twitter but many of these articles already have headlines catered to a certain method of consumption (aggregation done by Reddit, HN, etc.). I didn't need to read this article to know that Instagram's co-founders are making TikTok for text!
- montagg 4y ago
  And TikTok. It really depends what Tok you end up on, but there's plenty of corners of TikTok that are exactly the same mechanics as Twitter: quick bursts of infuriation that activate you and leave you wanting more. I think it's easier for a video-based content network like this (these are not social networks) to have content where you turn off your brain, like TV, than it would be with text. But they both can and are incentivized to do the same thing: titillate.
  - jamescostian 4y ago
    I'd argue that text has an advantage over video: speed of skipping past content you don't want. People don't talk anywhere near as fast as they skim headlines You're right about turning off your brain. But not everyone wants that thing turned off

nfRfqX5n 4y ago

interesting concept, but news? is that something people want more of?

mdwalters 4y ago
Very good resource for seeing what's happening around the world

crossroadsguy 4y ago

> A personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence Right! Then “enter your phone number”. These people are probably jumping on the next bandwagon? I recently saw something like this — I think it was post.news or so. Is it a new trend these days?

EamonnMR 4y ago
Post was a Twitter clone. Not a very good one either, I'm afraid. Isn't Twitter tiktok for text already?
- shusaku 4y ago
  The difference is every time you login into twitter and see your feed was set to algorithmic, you groan and switch it back to chronological. This app won’t let you switch it back.

razzimatazz 4y ago

How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my feed on your posts?

cloudking 4y ago
Maybe you could use all the HN links you comment on and upvote as signals, classify the links into categories, then surface new links from those categories in a "for you" personalized HN feed. You probably need more signals to make it work well, like how much time you spend looking at those links.

forgetcolor 4y ago

More accurate would be to call it TikTok for Links, not for text, as text without links isn't allowed.

mbesto 4y ago

> TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world. Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing but for text. Ummm, one huge glaring difference - TikTok's content is user generated, Artifact's is not. Why this is being compared to TikTok is beyond me...

galleywest200 4y ago

Cool -- how do I get my blogs to be picked up by their algorithm?

calo_star 4y ago

Sounds like Xiaohongshu without pictures to me.

hasbot 4y ago

Meh, I'll stick with Reddit and HN.

sethd 4y ago

Hopefully we haven’t entered a “TikTok for X” phase in tech journalism.

karaterobot 4y ago

Someday they'll cut creation out of the loop and just train a model to consume your list of liked Tweets and generate more tweetlike text objects that resemble them. Then you'll just an endless feed of complete trash you can scroll down for the rest of your life.

imaginationra 4y ago

[flagged]

beauHD 4y ago

Another reason to use RSS. I am skeptical of something whose founders make money by mining users' data. This is yet another attempt to mine your data and reading habits, and there's many successful attempts at that already (Evernote, Pocket, Kindle, etc). I'm tired of these apps who nose around in your reading, and I don't care if it's powered by AI. AI will never replace the serendipitous scrolling I do with my RSS client.

raman162 4y ago
I'm a big fan of RSS but RSS limits you to what you already have subscribed to. I think mining user data has become the unfortunate norm but there trying to provide more relevant content here so that's understandable. I'm curious to see how well this type of recommendation works in comparison to community based sites like hacker news and reddit.
- rambambram 4y ago
  > but RSS limits you to what you already have subscribed to Not if every website with a feed also shares their subscribed feeds. Like with an OPML file, which was already used as a feedlist exchange format. I aim to create this with my Really Social Sites software. And I'm always curious to scroll through someone else's meaningful lists of shared links. So if anyone cares to share their OPML file or list of interesting bookmarks, please reply.
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    I'd be interested to see what you already have. If you really want a pile of interesting bookmarks I bet a lot of people here (including me) could give you some and it might be worth making a whole new discussion (vía e.g. Show HN) for it.
    - rambambram 4y ago
      Not that much right now, but you can see a small list at the bottom of my company's website (see profile). Look for the text "You might also like ...". It's mostly sites/feeds that were already featured on HN somewhere in the last year. I was thinking of asking HN for lists of interesting bookmarks (or even OPML files) to share. I guess a lot of people here have interesting hobbies other than tech!

theGnuMe 4y ago

Wasn't there a version of this in China that was the inspiration for TikTok?

rcarr 4y ago

Over the past month I've started using RSS through a combination of ReadKit and Feedibin for everything I possibly can. YouTube videos, Reddit, Twitter, News Websites, Blogs, Newsletters. All of it, RSS. And it is absolutely fucking awesome. Some pertinent points: - My news addiction has dramatically declined in less than two weeks. I have a Feedbin action which automatically sets everything from Reddit, Hacker News, and news websites as read. I also utilise the Smart Folder functionality of ReadKit to exclude the same websites from the Today folder. This means I can click on these feed and have a look through it at my leisure but there's no pressure to 'get caught up' on everything. - As a result of the above, I am a lot more focussed and present and I am getting more shit done. I am wasting way less time mindlessly browsing low quality content and doomscrolling. - I no longer have to deal with a bunch of ads, cookie requests, email subscription popups and whatever else junk that is bringing the internet to the point where it's unusable. - Managing my email is now a joy. The only thing that goes there is correspondence, invoices and important account information. I've been unsubscribing to everything else as it comes in and keeping subscriptions to the newsletters I want to keep using the email address provided by Feedbin. - I use hnrss to handle hacker news and have a feed set up for replies to my comments which means I engage with people on this site better. I also have Front Page, Ask HN, Best Comments, Active etc all under one HN tag in Feedbin. I'm finding scrolling through this a better experience than just checking the Front Page, or the tabs separately. - I'm reading way more varied and better quality materials from individuals, blogs and specialist magazines rather than mainstreams journalists pushing politics and agendas. - As a result of all the above, the internet is FUN again. It feels like I've time travelled back 20 years to when the internet was full of unique and quirky webpages and you never knew what you was going to find. In reality it's been there the entire time, but social media, mainstream media, search engines and other massive corporations have pushed it out of site and sent me to sleep in order to earn money and purse their own agendas. Well, I am awake again and I will not be going back. And hopefully comments like this will help wake up others. You have to spend a little bit of time setting everything up and a few minutes each week tweaking things to keep it organised but it is absolutely worth the effort and the extra cost for the services.

rambambram 4y ago
Cool, I'm in the process of doing the same. The 'regular' social media is already out of the window, but Youtube is pulling hard on me. Time to transfer some channels to my RSS reader, I guess. First, it was hard. My daily dopamine shots ended abruptly while browsing purely through RSS feeds. One thing I wish more sites/feeds did, was adding images to the posts. I started practicing what I preach by building dedicated 'photo feeds'.

rchaud 4y ago

Wow, another walled-garden mobile app to fill your screen with algorithmically ordered blogspam. The article says it's "like Google Reader" except for the part where Google reader didn't take the liberty of filling your feed for you.

jamiequint 4y ago
[flagged]

ndneighbor 4y ago

Return of the king vibes here :) I am hoping this product really takes off. I do kinda see how this can fit the niche of a social RSS + recommendations.

msikora 4y ago

Wasn't this done already a few times? Mobile app only? Phone number to sign up??? Like "TikTok"???? Hard pass...

oblib 4y ago

"Tiktok for literate people?" got flagged? Come on... that seems a bit heavy handed.

imaginationra 4y ago
Yeah, seems a bit heavy handed and humorless around here 0_0

nikolay 4y ago

There's Twitter. There's Tumblr. There's Gab. There's Truth Social. There's Parler. There's GETTR. And we now have a decent Mastodon! Enough is enough! Stop fragmenting!

jwmoz 4y ago

An algorithmic echo chamber.

goldenchrome 4y ago

> and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to take a run at text-based social networking again. In what way has Twitter collapsed? This sounds highly political. Which of course it is, because “a feed of text posts” is in no way innovative. The innovation is in the selective censorship. Orwellian.

nickrubin 4y ago

Personalized news aggregators are "TikTok for text" now?

kyle-rb 4y ago

This could be cool if they source articles and blog posts from random places across the web, like StumbleUpon but with the modern ML that "works scarily well". Could be great for discoverability of smaller sites. Hopefully at some point they'll let me sign up with an email address though because I refuse to sign in with a phone number on principle.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

The future of social is fake people? I mean, they are right.

nilespotter 4y ago

Well, their first effort had such a positive impact on society... if they strike lightning twice it'll be Mad Max in no time.

stonogo 4y ago

> A personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence I remember when this was called Pressflip, and when that was called Persai. https://venturebeat.com/business/persai-a-personalized-online-news-aggregator/ https://venturebeat.com/business/persai-a-personalized-onlin...

RC_ITR 4y ago

Just to add context for anyone who doesn't know the history - Bytedance's first product was Toutiao, which means 'headlines' [0]. Douyin/Tik Tok grew out of that. The concept works well one a relatively homogeneous Internet like the one found in China, but I can see a lot of reasons why Western users who are used to more control via search and full data access wouldn't like it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao

vernon99 4y ago
Came here to say that. This is essentially Toutiao and this a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt. And indeed, why won’t people like an essentially an amazing text based recommendation system? Btw it was valued at 20b in 2017. So yeah no joke. Edit: typos
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Toutiao has loads of short video content, it's not really a text-dominated app. It launched its video channel in mid-2015.
  - vernon99 4y ago
    By then it already had 25m DAU and next year its revenue was 1b already. So yes it's content agnostic, but it started and rapidly grew as a text based aggregator with a strong recommendation system. From what I heard, TikTok's recommendation system is based on that and that was used to explain its ballistic growth.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt. I’d be careful with this type of thinking. Sometimes things can just be different. Take KOLs/live-streaming e-commerce for example. Works in China for a lot of reasons (they’re the worlds most populous time zone for example), but it comes off as a negative utility interaction for Westerners (why is a pretty girl begging me to buy tires?). Again, a lot of the differences are culture, especially in terms of China’s relatively controlled internet vs. the West’s relative free for all.

jms703 4y ago

It's hard enough to be selective with your choices of media. Having an algorithm shove media down your throat in a way that teaches blindly ignore the source seems like a bad idea...or a good idea, depending on who you are.

amelius 4y ago

Like Medium?

mseepgood 4y ago

How does one do those silly dances in text?

jiggywiggy 4y ago

It's wild people are still trying this. We were making these news aggragation websites 10 years ago all the time. There is even a Quora question about it I'm 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startups-failed https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu... There was one pretty big one that failed, anyone remember the name? I don't think the tech changed that much, also were using bunch of machine learning recommendation algorithms at the time. If anyone can pull it off its probably them, good luck to them.

jimhi 4y ago
What are you referring to?
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  It was easy to build and was a hype at the time. Many devs gave it a shot. See Quora in 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startups-failed https://www.quora.com/Why-have-most-personalized-news-startu...
gammarator 4y ago
I enjoyed prismatic back in the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795198

imaginationra 4y ago

TikTok for human artifacts that still retain an attention span and the ability to read something more than a headline.

college_physics 4y ago

Despite all qualms about privacy, ai manipulation, walled gardens etc (concerns which obviously dont carry much currency in certain circles) it would be a positive signal if this catches on. It would disprove the hypothesis that social media have gained popularity by increasingly dumbing down the main type of content. Long form text definitely would be a reversal of that trend.

fleddr 4y ago

News articles and the discussions surrounding them is what's made Facebook insufferable and Twitter the epicenter of the culture wars. I know, blame the culture or political landscape, not the app. But it is going to be your problem. And it's a big problem. Best of luck.

twelve40 4y ago

> Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook? because I really really want to just follow my friends? and not get random crap shoved in my face? please?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

numair 4y ago

Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, which anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and ended up lost in randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API. Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits.

numair 4y ago

Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, as anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and then ended up lost in memes and randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API. Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits. Or are they still in denial?

jay-barronville 4y ago

I'm curious to see how this plays out. I signed up. That said . . . > a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends Am I the only one who sees these platforms that curate content based on existing interests as a dangerous trend for our society? Here's what I mean: I used to be somewhat of a far-leftist. I'm far from that now, but looking back, I think one of the reasons why I held some of the unreasonable/divisive views I held was due to the invisible bubbles I was stuck in. These bubbles were powered and reinforced by my social media networks (especially Facebook). These platforms effectively help turn so many of us into ideologues rather than critical and independent thinkers. It's been many years now since I last had an active social media account and I lean more conservative now, but I'm very fearful of bubbles. I think they're dangerous and hold folks captive to one-dimensional perspectives, not to mention enabling extremism on all ends of the political spectrum. Because of this, I intentionally make sure my circle of friends is as diverse as possible (including everything from socialists to libertarians to hardcore conservatives). Even though I'm conservative now, I still study the leftist perspectives of different issues to make sure I come to what I consider the best conclusions possible without being subconsciously coerced into any conclusions due to being stuck in a bubble.

pm 4y ago
Absolutely: ideas reinforce if you're around them long enough. I don't think it was Facebook's intention for echo chambers to occur, but it was too profitable for them to stop it once it had.

mdwalters 4y ago

apparently you can use a disposable phone number to join the waitlist

ALittleLight 4y ago

I was feeling very good about this idea until I read - "Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality" Maybe I'm missing something or not understanding how the app actually works, but restricting publishers by quality standards seems like the opposite of TikTok's approach. TikTok's appeal for creators is that it's very easy to grow an audience. For the consumers - one appeal is that you're seeing "real" or amateur content, not the produced mainstream thing. Put another way - I can already consume mainstream outlets, I need a better to get independent voices. In my view they should ban racist and hateful stuff, because that would be a huge turnoff to most users, but other than that - try to be hands off in terms of moderation.

gnicholas 4y ago

I thought about building a text-only social network recently. The trouble is that engagement comes from getting people to keep scrolling, and this is much easier with videos and photos than text. I wish them the best of luck, and hope that they can build something that encourages more thoughtfulness. I also hope they don't become too censorious... > Both left- and right-leaning publishers were included; you’ll find Fox News there, for example. But Systrom isn’t shy about the fact that the company will be exercising its own judgment about who belongs and who doesn’t.

user_named 4y ago

So it's actually no like TikTok. It's like Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which is the algorithmic news app that came before tiktok and where bytedance built the recommendation engine used in tiktok.

mshake2 4y ago

Do you think successful founders ever get self-conscious and insecure at the idea that their primary success had a lot of luck involved?

royal___ 4y ago

Google has been doing this with their news feed for years, this article makes it sound like some revolutionary idea but it's really not anything new.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

Do these guys know what ByteDance is lol? They started as a tiktok for text (Toutiao) before expanding into video...

thenerdhead 4y ago

I like this concept and the timing is just about right to be successful too. You can use it in many different ways: - A curated feed by those who you trust to curate quality content (akin to certain twitter users). - A for you feed that helps you curate quality content that you have high engagement with. - No comment sections between you and the content which can alter your perspective prior to reading. - Naturally weeds out the junk that sometimes gets posted in higher quality feeds like HN. - Helps you discover new and budding writers similar to substack.

roughly 4y ago

How on earth do you come out with "Algorithmically curated news feed" in 2023 and think it's a good idea? We didn't know these things were doomsday devices back in 2012, what's their excuse today?

klabb3 4y ago
I agree. They’re not even acknowledging the total horror show that public social media has become. Instead they’re leaning into AI and basically telling us that the reason we’re not happy is because of inefficient recommendation systems – a misreading of the room at levels only Bay Area execs can achieve. People’s contempt for these platforms rose proportionally to the amount of agency that these opaque recommendation engines removed. If you want to innovate in this space, you have to change the game entirely. Perhaps it means exposing the parameters for “discovery” to let the users be in control. Perhaps it’s finding alternative revenue sources, so that the users become customers. Perhaps it’s about changing fundamentally how moderation, visibility and trust works. Taking an idea from 2010 and putting a GPT sticker on it ain’t it.
- mliker 4y ago
  People’s contempt rose because the media painted these platforms to be “evil”.
  - smolder 4y ago
    Media painted these platforms to be "evil" because they chose to be "evil." It wasn't for no reason.
mikeiz404 4y ago
I think they are hoping to moderate content more strictly and select a metric to optimize which (hopefully) better aligns with the individual. > “One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity,” he says. “Right? Just make the hard decision.” > Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods, he says. And its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects — as opposed to, say, what generates the most clicks and comments — in an effort to reward more deeply engaging material. But I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off. I think the funding model they settle on will inevitably play the biggest role though.

billiam 4y ago

Wow, I guess PT Barnum was right about never losing money on underestimating the intelligence of people but this really is a new low. If TikTok is selling a video snippet app like smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans then I guess this is putting the smallpox onto whiskey barrels for them. The one thing olds like me still use the Internet for, reading things I want to, why not spend more of my day moving my eyes back and forth over words carefully chosen by machine to trigger dopamine spikes in my head?

wonderwonder 4y ago

So this is twitter but you can only post articles that contain advertisements? And it even gives you an inbox? Maybe the magic is in the algorithm but I am currently not inspired and I really like twitter.

its-summertime 4y ago

Isn't that the exact same thing as, well, Facebook's popular articles or Twitter's popular tweets but as a whole thing? Sounds like it could get killed off by mistake just from a minor feature change of either of those companies.

8en 4y ago

I'm excited about this. Kevin and Mikey are 2 of the most talented product builders out there. And, I miss having a really great go-to news reader app.

gverrilla 4y ago

> “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” he said. Here we can see their concept of quality.. > Systrom also told me Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information. That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality, he told me. For now, the company won’t disclose every publisher in its system, but you can search for individual outlets within the app. Here they say they will make an effort to maintain quality. Which means: over the roof engagement and sales of advertisement.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Another mobile-only product, like Instagram used to be. I get I must not be the demographic, so I guess I don't matter... but... why? Why do this? I've seen this pattern a few times with things that intend on being new Facebook or Twitter replacements. Product managers / designers making this choice to exclude non-mobile. I not only won't use them (barely use my phone), but I distrust the motives.

rusabd 4y ago

Targeting seems little bit off here, happy to be wrong (people who like to read) Artifact is here (people who don't want to type text to search)

psuresh 4y ago

Artificial fact !?

causality0 4y ago

If an algorithm controls what I read then I will end up reading nothing but what I've read before and puff pieces to validate my preexisting opinions. Fuck that.

politician 4y ago

To close the loop, what this really needs is a GPT-based journalism website.

nowherebeen 4y ago

So this is a newsfeed? I think Hacker News has been doing a good job without AI. You simply need a community. I am not sure turning Facebook's news feed feature into a product is really that innovative. How many reputable news sources are there to supply their feed?

hackernewds 4y ago

So Google News with comments? Or reddit with a different UI?

rahimnathwani 4y ago

This seems like an English version of 今日头条 (Jinri Toutiao), a very popular news feed app that ByteDance made before they launched Douyin/TikTok.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

mgarciaisaia 4y ago

> "Every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly." [Citation needed]

adql 4y ago
It's ver simple, they just meant companies selling ads on those platforms, their experience got better

bilater 4y ago

Here for the luddite RSS comments.

est 4y ago

Tiktok was spun-off of Musical.ly, which kids cringe dance with existing tracks. Does such behavior exists for texts? All I can recall is rage comics.

jarjoura 4y ago

The appeal to TikTok isn't just that it zeroes in on my attention, it's that the content is mixed and matched and cross-referenced with each other. So it feels like a special place where you can only find that content. Aggregating news seems, to me at least, not special, and something Google News already does. It "magically" knows what my current interests and shows me lots of sources of that. For everything else, I enjoy the Reddit model. Zeroing in on someone's attention for long form content that looks legitimate also scares me as that's how conspiracy theories spread.

Sunspark 4y ago

I recommend they make a web interface as well. I don't think this app will last long anyway, previous text recommendation apps were bought out.

the100rabh 4y ago

[dead]

plastic3169 4y ago

So much negativity for this in here. Is it a flop? Maybe? Most things are. Can we know it without trying? I don’t think so. Why not just let it run and see the results?

WA 4y ago

Twitter works, because I read information that is NOT distilled by "big media outlets". I wanna hear the voices of indie devs, doctors, researchers etc. I don't need a fancy RSS reader with a sorting algorithm. Unless they make user generated content a priority, this will not succeed.

atoav 4y ago
This is what drives me nuts about nearly any social media platform: Give me the stuff I follow in chronological order. If you wanna let me discover new stuff put it in small somewhere to the side. On instagram basically every 3rd post/story is someone who I am not following, who I don't give the slightest shit about or advertisements. This seriously makes me consider leaving the platform all together, just give me one more reason and I am gone. I really wonder if it is possible to develope a decent public platform of any kind under capitalism or if everything is just bound to turn into this.
- WA 4y ago
  I get the rage and I agree. I prefer it as well. But three points to consider: 1. In Twitter, just create lists instead of following. Strict reverse chronological order with no ads. Or use Mastodon, which has this by default. 2. Most users actually do want curated content and not EVERYTHING. 3. Reverse chronological order is also an algorithm with upsides and downsides. It's not like it is a "pure" thing.

low_tech_love 4y ago

Is it common at all for people who happen to hit gold with one app to actually come back and have other hit apps? I see it all the time that things are advertised as being the next hit app from this or that person and, as far as I remember, it almost never works.

Agentlien 4y ago
The first example which comes to mind is Niklas Zennström who first got well-known as the businessman who invested in Kazaa and later founded Skype.
- djmips 4y ago
  Two pillars of technology today.
  - heywhatupboys 4y ago
    no one uses Skype anymore though
    - sali0 4y ago
      He left out the /s
      - heywhatupboys 4y ago
        no one uses Kazaa either, the joke is Skype is even more long gone...
        neuronic 4y ago
        While it might be (way) less popular, Skype still exists. [1] Also: > Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols.[50] Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. [2] [1] https://www.skype.com https://www.skype.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams#Protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams#Protocols

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago

I'm so tried of people building junk to shove random content into people's faces every second of the damn day it's like reading/discovering/studying isn't supposed to be relaxing anymore but noisy and always yelling at you I hate it and the drivel fades from memory to quickly

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Good thing: new app, that might be fun to use (like instagram was) Bad thing: after a year or two, it will be sold to meta/google/someone_like_that and only show ads with a sprinkle of your friends' content inbetween (like instagram is)

RektBoy 4y ago

I hope it will be same OSINT treasure trove like BeReal was (is). Yikes.

seydor 4y ago

So, like HN?

esskay 4y ago

It is quite amazing that with the experience people like these co-founders have that they put that to use creating things that, on the face of it look like fairly obvious flops. It really does highlight just how many people get lucky with one good idea. In addition the AI side of things is enough to turn me off. We've supposedly got AI based recommendations on YouTube, however despite me never showing any interest I still get videos of someone holding up a product with their mouth wide open like a carp, or random minecraft content that I've repeatedly marked as being not interested in.

dt3ft 4y ago

So you need to give up your phone number in order to sign up. Have people really stopped caring about privacy?

substation13 4y ago

I'm excited. Early social networks - before the monetization / KPI / A-B test crowd get to powerful are fun!

melx 4y ago

36 HTTP requests totaling 459kB of random things to render a simple (and single) html input ?? Truly personalized experience.

erikpl 4y ago

Sounds like yet another echo chamber... Will be interesting so see how they plan to tackle the issues of factuality and bias in the articles they feed users (if they plan to address that at all).

fiskeben 4y ago

When you describe your product as "<different product> for <some domain>" you've already failed. When was the last time that worked!

tsylba 4y ago

I love how the word "social" has been preempted to mean the exact opposite of it.

machiaweliczny 4y ago

I think it will be hard for them to compete with Twitter.

Veen 4y ago

I read this article immediately after reading Corey Doctorow's The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok [0]. It's a useful juxtaposition if you're interested in thinking about how Artifact is likely to develop if it gains traction. [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

notjulianjaynes 4y ago
I love that i clicked this and read: >Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. You’ve read your last complimentary article this month. Subscribe Now. If you're already a subscriber sign in. Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130001322/https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230130001322/https://www.wired...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- graphe 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/mlh24BnhKmo https://youtu.be/mlh24BnhKmo Just read the comments even if you don't watch it. I watched the ad for fun. He makes a video against addictive games sponsored by raid shadow lol.
creata 4y ago
I think https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys is the same article, published on Doctorow's website.

TehShrike 4y ago

The value of my feed comes from the reputation that those people have with me. I trust the things most of them share more than I trust twoots from the broader internet, and if they abuse that trust, I unfollow them. If I want a curated list of posts and thoughts from people who don't have a specific reputation with me, I come to HN :-P

alxmng 4y ago

Why even need sources like NYT? Just generate the headlines and articles using ChatGPT perfectly tailored to what you want to hear :)

agentultra 4y ago

Algorithmically curated social media content didn’t work for Facebook. It didn’t work for Twitter. … but maybe it will work for Artifact.

hk1337 4y ago

So, like Twitter with a slight twist on how the feed works?

dragonelite 4y ago

Is this like twitter clone with better recommendations?

jaseemabid 4y ago

This is what I wanted Apple News to be. I wish it would give me a good curated news feed from dozens of sources, and adapt based on feedback. I badly wanted to love it, but no matter how much I tried it ended up looking something like a mix of Buzzfeed and Murdoch propaganda. Happy to see the idea is not dead and new companies are giving it a shot.