14 ms·

Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders

106 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

Cheer2171 3y ago
Yawho? I really thought Yahoo! was just a brand now, like Nokia. > more than 185 million people come to Yahoo News every month
- kken 3y ago
  You are wrong on both accounts. Nokia had 22B revenue last year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia
  - OJFord 3y ago
    They're presumably referring to the brand of phones, which was sold/licensed to HMD Global.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Isn't it more the opposite, it's the parent umbrella brand owning e.g. Techcrunch. I assume the Yahoo News content is just rebadged from subsidiaries, but I don't know. 184 million of them probably by accident; 180 million of them bouncing at the obnoxious cookie wall.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Came to say similar; Anyone else amazed when stories pop up that Yahoo is doing anything/still going? I know it's based on just their large userbase/history and portfolio of services/acquisitions but still... Was even surprised to hear Marissa Mayer was still kickin about recently (https://sunshine.com/introducing-shine/ https://sunshine.com/introducing-shine/)
  - nolongerthere 3y ago
    Wow, that’s… an actually useful app, if only I could trust something like that. It’s also the sort of thing that Apple and Google could Sherlock very easily, though they obviously won’t be interoperable. Love the idea tho.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- nolok 3y ago
  Nokia was and is a massive company. Their cellphone operation was an offshot that grew wild, sort of like AWS for amazon (at least until it crashed).
jaredwiener 3y ago
BTW, if anyone here is looking for a replacement to Artifact -- I've been working on https://www.forth.news https://www.forth.news. We're a news feed for news; scroll/follow like social media, but all posts come from verified journalists who agree to an editorial policy. Would love to know your thoughts.
- MisterSandman 3y ago
  It’s probably in your TODO list, but would appreciate non-US PIN codes at some point! (Or at least Canada)
  - jaredwiener 3y ago
    If you're talking about the "Nearby" page, it's because at the moment we only have local coverage in the US. We're working on ramping up -- so hopefully we can come to Canada soon.
    - VancouverMan 3y ago
      Do you know yet which Canadian sources you'd likely use content from? For news matters that I have had direct personal knowledge about, I've often found that the coverage from the so-called "mainstream" Canadian news media has been quite bad. The most accurate and relevant Canadian news reporting I've seen has been from anonymous or quasi-anonymous Reddit comments, Twitter tweets, YouTube videos, blog posts, and comments on "mainstream" articles (back when they tended to allow those), for example, rather than from anybody who might be called a "verified journalist". Aggregating and selecting from the "mainstream" Canadian news media wouldn't provide any real value to me.
      - jaredwiener 3y ago
        I don't -- and that's one of the reasons why we're starting close to home. That said, every journalist on Forth agrees to follow our editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial) to ensure a standard of coverage. And if anyone reading this is a reporter or newsroom leader, we'd love to talk: https://journalists.forth.news https://journalists.forth.news
pimlottc 3y ago
Not a single description in this piece of what Artifact actually is. "AI news app" could be a lot of things. Elsewhere [0], it is described as "a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests" and "a kind of TikTok for text" or "Google Reader reborn as a mobile app". 0: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579552/artifact-instagram-cofounders-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-news-app https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579552/artifact-instagr...
- gnicholas 3y ago
  In my experience it was a nice reader, though it hyper-specialized a bit too much. I read a few articles about cars, and it fed me nothing but car articles. It became impossible to read anything else, further cementing its belief that I love to read about cars.
  - garciasn 3y ago
    This is exactly the problem with any recommendation engine, IME. They either: 1. Feed you nothing but content about something you looked at once. 2. Show you stuff you already bought. No, I don't need another exact or very similar XYZ widget; show me something RELATED yet very different, thank you very much. 3. They show absolute garbage that is in no way related to what I like. --- Exhausting, really; and, probably why most people find AI/ML largely useless as it exists today.
    - timy2shoes 3y ago
      From a practitioners perspective, I view this type of behavior as tuning the model more towards the exploitation side of the exploration/exploitation trade-off. I think a lot of recommendation engines do this (looking at you YouTube) because it’s more profitable.
      - wongarsu 3y ago
        Which at its core is probably an alignment problem in the way the models are evaluated: they are measured on their short-term effects, and there exploitation rules. But if you look at the long-term effect of recommendations you really need a healthy dose of exploration to keep your users around.
buggeryorkshire 3y ago
That's artifact dead, then.
Linda231 3y ago
[dead]
neom 3y ago
I really liked Artifact for some reason. It's the only news app I've ever installed that actually managed to push interesting news to me at the right time, I'd sent them A LOT of emails asking if I could just pay $5/mth for the push notification stuff, their idea to get into community was silly imo, news app doesn't need a community around it, just push the right news to me and that in itself it is useful.
- nradov 3y ago
  Obviously Artifact was built to flip. Dealing with that type of subscriber payment would have just been a distraction for them.
Kappa90 3y ago
If you're looking for a replacement for Artifact (and for news apps in general), you should check out https://tailor.news https://tailor.news It aggregates the news from thousands of newspapers, youtube channels and podcasts, then serves you a summarized digestible version, as a feed and as a personalized podcast, using LLM models. You can also ask to clarify or explain the news, and there's a new function to ask if an article's claims are supported by other sources, to avoid reading biased or opinionated information. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Tailor
- mcoliver 3y ago
  Heads up looks like something is broken. Trying to sign up on Android and it's asking for 4 interests. Nothing auto completes but it will take my input directly. However when I try and hit continue nothing happens.
  - Kappa90 3y ago
    There seems to be a peak in traffic I guess due to HN, apologies! If you have any further problems it would be really helpful if you'd let me know at em@usetailor.com
narcindin 3y ago
I get the https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ daily newsletter in my RSS reader. A few important news stories each day. Where important is decided by ChatGPT.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dwighttk 3y ago
Yahoo! can buy things?
- fundad 3y ago
  Verizon sold Yahoo and AOL to private equity
htrp 3y ago
Recommender systems are also AI
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  Linear regressions are also AI.
arrosenberg 3y ago
I really just want the Pulse app that LinkedIn shut down a decade ago. Who needs AI for reading news?
- ahstilde 3y ago
  Pulse powers all of LinkedIn's feed, now.
petercooper 3y ago
Echoes of when Yahoo bought Summly 11 years ago – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9952658/British-teen-sells-Summly-app-for-millions.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechno... – then rolled out its design and tech as part of Yahoo News Digest (an app I thought was pretty cool, tbh).
TySchultz 3y ago
Last year artifact inspired me to build out my own AI news app. Even though they decided to shut down I still think there is potential here for more niche products not looking to grow to massive scale. My news app, Quill, focuses more on completion than endless scrolling. Similar to a traditional newspaper. ~10 stories a day and you can be done. Similar to yahoo news digest from years back. https://apple.co/3O8BPxr https://apple.co/3O8BPxr
- timenova 3y ago
  "This app is currently not available in your country or region." Perhaps you can drop the geo-block?
- Zambyte 3y ago
  I want to do something similar by analyzing my activitypub feed and RSS feeds with a local LLM. I think that would be a much healthier way for me to receive news from the internet.
  - TySchultz 3y ago
    Thats exactly what I am doing here just with a massive list of RSS feeds. Changing it to a list of personal RSS feeds would be a pretty cool idea. It would allow your own personal digest for the day.
- technotarek 3y ago
  Just installed and gave it a try. Good initial vibe. One of the first things I wanted to do was share a particular story/summary with someone else (ideally by text or email). Since you’re pushing the sharing idea at the bottom of the front page, maybe you want to consider that option as well? Not much beats getting a potential new user by feeding them the real meat of your product.
  - TySchultz 3y ago
    Thanks for checking it out! I think thats a great idea. Since they are already on iOS a custom share link could be a nice hook into the app. Ill work on getting something added around a share link for each story.
Apocryphon 3y ago
“They ran an experiment. None of their lives have been ruined.” He knew they’d get good jobs, even if it meant the life of a project manager at Yahoo. “And none of their investors’ lives have been ruined either. When they close up shop, their investors will say, ‘That’s one more off the books. I don’t need to help them anymore. I get my time back.’” No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush, Gideon Lewis-Kraus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
scarface_74 3y ago
I knew about Artifact only because John Gruber (daringfireball) and Ben Thompson (Stratechery) have talked about it. But what perplexed me was that “Yahoo” was buying something. I knew that the Yahoo website existed and the various properties. What I didn’t know was that it was an independent company again. This sent me down a deep rabbit hole trying to figure out exactly what Yahoo was these days. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Inc._(2017–present) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Inc._(2017–present) It looks like the current incarnation is Yahoo and a lot of dead acquired brands that are just reskinned news portals except for TechCrunch and Engadget
nytesky 3y ago
Ya-Who? I thought they were borged by a cable company or similar ilk.
scanny 3y ago
I have found ground.news [1] decent, it limits the AI to creating quick summaries and assessing which side of the political spectrum news articles and organisations fall. The rest is up to the reader. 1. https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
KoolKat23 3y ago
The amount of tracker data this app sent within 5 minutes of install was just insane, immediately removed it.
627467 3y ago
> [2013] Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) recently announced its acquisition of Summly, a news app for which Yahoo paid $30 million according to AllThingsD.[0] > Summly was created by 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio and launched for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. The app works as a news condenser i.e. it narrows down a full-length article or news to 350-400 words thus making it easier for readers to grasp the gist of the news.[0] [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150829007.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150... we are stuck in a loop. is this peak AI signal?
- dbbk 3y ago
  I thought I'd seen this film before
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Maybe we're going backwards. Time to build a new social bookmarking site for the inevitable acquisition.
  - neilk 3y ago
    As Maciej always says, do not attempt to compete with Pinboard
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      That's in Zero to One. Competition is for losers. Small guys try to scare away competition with threats. Big guys lie that there's lots of competition. But no one wants competition.
      - neilk 3y ago
        I wouldn't dream to speak for Maciej Cegłowski here. I would require a greater depth of literacy and far more Eastern European family history to achieve that level of sardonic commentary. But... I don't think he'd appreciate the reference. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3APinboard%20thiel&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3APinboard%20thiel&src=typ... Pinboard, the product, should inspire a strategy that might be called Ten to One. Enter an app category which everyone has overspent on, wait for them to smash into the wall, and absorb their users into your self-racked server running PHP.
hbn 3y ago
> It sounds like there’s also a good chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and polish over time, too. If their current app is slow and unpolished, I don't know why buying an unrelated app for its recommendation algorithm is going to help them. I never really got the hype with Artifact to begin with. I tried it when it launched, and it seemed like... any other news reader? Recommendation algorithms are not a hot new capability of AI, we've had them forever. I'm not convinced Artifact has any special sauce that Yahoo couldn't have reproduced themselves. Is this acquisition just for PR?
mandeepj 3y ago
I thought they shut it down due to lacklustre response https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036539/artifact-shutting-down-kevin-systrom https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036539/artifact-shuttin...
neilk 3y ago
> It sounds like there’s also a good chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and polish over time, too. This never happens. Good design isn’t a quality you can spread around. Speed and polish are the result of focus. In an acquisition by a big company, you’re expanding the number of people you have to work with, who all want to carve up your app into little pieces. Once you integrate with the bigco’s security, auth, ops, design language, branding, adtech, billing, matrix management, and this quarter’s initiatives, there’s no “speed and polish” left. The best case scenario for retaining good design is that you’re bringing enough users/revenue that you get to be a Very Special Snowflake in the org chart. Or, if your acquired company outputs a software artifact for the rest of the company to use, like a search engine or database.
- flakiness 3y ago
  Note that their Android version was very sluggish and I have some hesitation in calling out its "speed and polish".
- hbn 3y ago
  I thought that line was funny too. Speed and polish is rarely an additive change. You don't just copy-paste some "go fast" code over to the other code base!
ijustwanttovote 3y ago
I enjoyed the app. I was disappointed when they closed it because they couldn't find a revenue stream.
josefresco 3y ago
Not sure if I posted this before but Artifact reminds me of an app I use frequently (no association): https://www.boringreport.org https://www.boringreport.org They basically use "AI" to scrub the "emotion' and other garbage from the news.
freddealmeida 3y ago
I actually liked Artifact but it made two mistakes when launching. i) they limited access thinking people would be driven to join even after they fell off the news cycle. This was mistaken. No one wants to be limited on access. And when your business model is eyeballs, limiting them is ridiculous. ii) The over focused on design rather than content. Almost no one trusted it. And trust should have been the focus in the team. That yahoo is buying it is probably driven by the investors trying to get out of it. If you want to build a news app, with AI or not, then focus on deep investigation and truth and avoid propaganda. I'd join that. I'd pay for that. Otherwise, get your books in order to sell to another bullshit tech company that doesn't care about truth or reality.
redbell 3y ago
The shutdown announcement was discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612 Also, if you are like me, still have the Artifact app installed on your phone (Android, in my case) and launch the app. You will get a pop-up that reads: " To Our Artifact Users We've already shared our decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. You may have noticed that we kept our core news reading capability running a bit longer than planned - until April 2nd. While Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app or site, the proprietary Al-powered personalization technology and other features will live on and be integrated across Yahoo, including in Yahoo News, in the months to come. We think the technology Artifact has created will be even more impactful with the scale of the Yahoo News network. ranked the #1 news and information property in the US in 2023. Thank you to all who have joined us on this adventure we call Artifact. Can't wait to see how the technology we've built lives on through Yahoo. "
nikolay 3y ago
Nice! Otherwie my shared links would have died!
vvladymyrov 3y ago
I’m missing the app already. Somehow I’ve got highly addicted to the idea be click article summary feature of Artifact. There was something highly gratifying of scrolling through articles’ titles and getting bullet point summary and not scrolling and reading through gazzilion of ads and pop ups most of the articles have nowadays. Recommendation part was more subtle, but working for me - there few occasional that I’ve learn something useful or interesting to me… I would be grateful if somebody would suggest apps or service with similar article summarization functionality on a tip of users’ fingers.
lulznews 3y ago
So cash dump to buddies?

106 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

Yawho? I really thought Yahoo! was just a brand now, like Nokia. > more than 185 million people come to Yahoo News every month

kken 3y ago
You are wrong on both accounts. Nokia had 22B revenue last year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia
- OJFord 3y ago
  They're presumably referring to the brand of phones, which was sold/licensed to HMD Global.
OJFord 3y ago
Isn't it more the opposite, it's the parent umbrella brand owning e.g. Techcrunch. I assume the Yahoo News content is just rebadged from subsidiaries, but I don't know. 184 million of them probably by accident; 180 million of them bouncing at the obnoxious cookie wall.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Came to say similar; Anyone else amazed when stories pop up that Yahoo is doing anything/still going? I know it's based on just their large userbase/history and portfolio of services/acquisitions but still... Was even surprised to hear Marissa Mayer was still kickin about recently (https://sunshine.com/introducing-shine/ https://sunshine.com/introducing-shine/)
- nolongerthere 3y ago
  Wow, that’s… an actually useful app, if only I could trust something like that. It’s also the sort of thing that Apple and Google could Sherlock very easily, though they obviously won’t be interoperable. Love the idea tho.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nolok 3y ago
Nokia was and is a massive company. Their cellphone operation was an offshot that grew wild, sort of like AWS for amazon (at least until it crashed).

jaredwiener 3y ago

BTW, if anyone here is looking for a replacement to Artifact -- I've been working on https://www.forth.news https://www.forth.news. We're a news feed for news; scroll/follow like social media, but all posts come from verified journalists who agree to an editorial policy. Would love to know your thoughts.

MisterSandman 3y ago
It’s probably in your TODO list, but would appreciate non-US PIN codes at some point! (Or at least Canada)
- jaredwiener 3y ago
  If you're talking about the "Nearby" page, it's because at the moment we only have local coverage in the US. We're working on ramping up -- so hopefully we can come to Canada soon.
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    Do you know yet which Canadian sources you'd likely use content from? For news matters that I have had direct personal knowledge about, I've often found that the coverage from the so-called "mainstream" Canadian news media has been quite bad. The most accurate and relevant Canadian news reporting I've seen has been from anonymous or quasi-anonymous Reddit comments, Twitter tweets, YouTube videos, blog posts, and comments on "mainstream" articles (back when they tended to allow those), for example, rather than from anybody who might be called a "verified journalist". Aggregating and selecting from the "mainstream" Canadian news media wouldn't provide any real value to me.
    - jaredwiener 3y ago
      I don't -- and that's one of the reasons why we're starting close to home. That said, every journalist on Forth agrees to follow our editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial) to ensure a standard of coverage. And if anyone reading this is a reporter or newsroom leader, we'd love to talk: https://journalists.forth.news https://journalists.forth.news

pimlottc 3y ago

Not a single description in this piece of what Artifact actually is. "AI news app" could be a lot of things. Elsewhere [0], it is described as "a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests" and "a kind of TikTok for text" or "Google Reader reborn as a mobile app". 0: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579552/artifact-instagram-cofounders-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-news-app https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579552/artifact-instagr...

gnicholas 3y ago
In my experience it was a nice reader, though it hyper-specialized a bit too much. I read a few articles about cars, and it fed me nothing but car articles. It became impossible to read anything else, further cementing its belief that I love to read about cars.
- garciasn 3y ago
  This is exactly the problem with any recommendation engine, IME. They either: 1. Feed you nothing but content about something you looked at once. 2. Show you stuff you already bought. No, I don't need another exact or very similar XYZ widget; show me something RELATED yet very different, thank you very much. 3. They show absolute garbage that is in no way related to what I like. --- Exhausting, really; and, probably why most people find AI/ML largely useless as it exists today.
  - timy2shoes 3y ago
    From a practitioners perspective, I view this type of behavior as tuning the model more towards the exploitation side of the exploration/exploitation trade-off. I think a lot of recommendation engines do this (looking at you YouTube) because it’s more profitable.
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      Which at its core is probably an alignment problem in the way the models are evaluated: they are measured on their short-term effects, and there exploitation rules. But if you look at the long-term effect of recommendations you really need a healthy dose of exploration to keep your users around.

buggeryorkshire 3y ago

That's artifact dead, then.

Linda231 3y ago

[dead]

neom 3y ago

I really liked Artifact for some reason. It's the only news app I've ever installed that actually managed to push interesting news to me at the right time, I'd sent them A LOT of emails asking if I could just pay $5/mth for the push notification stuff, their idea to get into community was silly imo, news app doesn't need a community around it, just push the right news to me and that in itself it is useful.

nradov 3y ago
Obviously Artifact was built to flip. Dealing with that type of subscriber payment would have just been a distraction for them.

Kappa90 3y ago

If you're looking for a replacement for Artifact (and for news apps in general), you should check out https://tailor.news https://tailor.news It aggregates the news from thousands of newspapers, youtube channels and podcasts, then serves you a summarized digestible version, as a feed and as a personalized podcast, using LLM models. You can also ask to clarify or explain the news, and there's a new function to ask if an article's claims are supported by other sources, to avoid reading biased or opinionated information. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Tailor

mcoliver 3y ago
Heads up looks like something is broken. Trying to sign up on Android and it's asking for 4 interests. Nothing auto completes but it will take my input directly. However when I try and hit continue nothing happens.
- Kappa90 3y ago
  There seems to be a peak in traffic I guess due to HN, apologies! If you have any further problems it would be really helpful if you'd let me know at em@usetailor.com

narcindin 3y ago

I get the https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ daily newsletter in my RSS reader. A few important news stories each day. Where important is decided by ChatGPT.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dwighttk 3y ago

Yahoo! can buy things?

fundad 3y ago
Verizon sold Yahoo and AOL to private equity

htrp 3y ago

Recommender systems are also AI

Cheer2171 3y ago
Linear regressions are also AI.

arrosenberg 3y ago

I really just want the Pulse app that LinkedIn shut down a decade ago. Who needs AI for reading news?

ahstilde 3y ago
Pulse powers all of LinkedIn's feed, now.

petercooper 3y ago

Echoes of when Yahoo bought Summly 11 years ago – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9952658/British-teen-sells-Summly-app-for-millions.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechno... – then rolled out its design and tech as part of Yahoo News Digest (an app I thought was pretty cool, tbh).

TySchultz 3y ago

Last year artifact inspired me to build out my own AI news app. Even though they decided to shut down I still think there is potential here for more niche products not looking to grow to massive scale. My news app, Quill, focuses more on completion than endless scrolling. Similar to a traditional newspaper. ~10 stories a day and you can be done. Similar to yahoo news digest from years back. https://apple.co/3O8BPxr https://apple.co/3O8BPxr

timenova 3y ago
"This app is currently not available in your country or region." Perhaps you can drop the geo-block?
Zambyte 3y ago
I want to do something similar by analyzing my activitypub feed and RSS feeds with a local LLM. I think that would be a much healthier way for me to receive news from the internet.
- TySchultz 3y ago
  Thats exactly what I am doing here just with a massive list of RSS feeds. Changing it to a list of personal RSS feeds would be a pretty cool idea. It would allow your own personal digest for the day.
technotarek 3y ago
Just installed and gave it a try. Good initial vibe. One of the first things I wanted to do was share a particular story/summary with someone else (ideally by text or email). Since you’re pushing the sharing idea at the bottom of the front page, maybe you want to consider that option as well? Not much beats getting a potential new user by feeding them the real meat of your product.
- TySchultz 3y ago
  Thanks for checking it out! I think thats a great idea. Since they are already on iOS a custom share link could be a nice hook into the app. Ill work on getting something added around a share link for each story.

Apocryphon 3y ago

“They ran an experiment. None of their lives have been ruined.” He knew they’d get good jobs, even if it meant the life of a project manager at Yahoo. “And none of their investors’ lives have been ruined either. When they close up shop, their investors will say, ‘That’s one more off the books. I don’t need to help them anymore. I get my time back.’” No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush, Gideon Lewis-Kraus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902

scarface_74 3y ago

I knew about Artifact only because John Gruber (daringfireball) and Ben Thompson (Stratechery) have talked about it. But what perplexed me was that “Yahoo” was buying something. I knew that the Yahoo website existed and the various properties. What I didn’t know was that it was an independent company again. This sent me down a deep rabbit hole trying to figure out exactly what Yahoo was these days. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Inc._(2017–present) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Inc._(2017–present) It looks like the current incarnation is Yahoo and a lot of dead acquired brands that are just reskinned news portals except for TechCrunch and Engadget

nytesky 3y ago

Ya-Who? I thought they were borged by a cable company or similar ilk.

scanny 3y ago

I have found ground.news [1] decent, it limits the AI to creating quick summaries and assessing which side of the political spectrum news articles and organisations fall. The rest is up to the reader. 1. https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

KoolKat23 3y ago

The amount of tracker data this app sent within 5 minutes of install was just insane, immediately removed it.

627467 3y ago

> [2013] Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) recently announced its acquisition of Summly, a news app for which Yahoo paid $30 million according to AllThingsD.[0] > Summly was created by 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio and launched for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. The app works as a news condenser i.e. it narrows down a full-length article or news to 350-400 words thus making it easier for readers to grasp the gist of the news.[0] [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150829007.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150... we are stuck in a loop. is this peak AI signal?

dbbk 3y ago
I thought I'd seen this film before
Apocryphon 3y ago
Maybe we're going backwards. Time to build a new social bookmarking site for the inevitable acquisition.
- neilk 3y ago
  As Maciej always says, do not attempt to compete with Pinboard
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    That's in Zero to One. Competition is for losers. Small guys try to scare away competition with threats. Big guys lie that there's lots of competition. But no one wants competition.
    - neilk 3y ago
      I wouldn't dream to speak for Maciej Cegłowski here. I would require a greater depth of literacy and far more Eastern European family history to achieve that level of sardonic commentary. But... I don't think he'd appreciate the reference. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3APinboard%20thiel&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3APinboard%20thiel&src=typ... Pinboard, the product, should inspire a strategy that might be called Ten to One. Enter an app category which everyone has overspent on, wait for them to smash into the wall, and absorb their users into your self-racked server running PHP.

hbn 3y ago

> It sounds like there’s also a good chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and polish over time, too. If their current app is slow and unpolished, I don't know why buying an unrelated app for its recommendation algorithm is going to help them. I never really got the hype with Artifact to begin with. I tried it when it launched, and it seemed like... any other news reader? Recommendation algorithms are not a hot new capability of AI, we've had them forever. I'm not convinced Artifact has any special sauce that Yahoo couldn't have reproduced themselves. Is this acquisition just for PR?

mandeepj 3y ago

I thought they shut it down due to lacklustre response https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036539/artifact-shutting-down-kevin-systrom https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036539/artifact-shuttin...

neilk 3y ago

> It sounds like there’s also a good chance that Yahoo’s apps might get a bit of Artifact’s speed and polish over time, too. This never happens. Good design isn’t a quality you can spread around. Speed and polish are the result of focus. In an acquisition by a big company, you’re expanding the number of people you have to work with, who all want to carve up your app into little pieces. Once you integrate with the bigco’s security, auth, ops, design language, branding, adtech, billing, matrix management, and this quarter’s initiatives, there’s no “speed and polish” left. The best case scenario for retaining good design is that you’re bringing enough users/revenue that you get to be a Very Special Snowflake in the org chart. Or, if your acquired company outputs a software artifact for the rest of the company to use, like a search engine or database.

flakiness 3y ago
Note that their Android version was very sluggish and I have some hesitation in calling out its "speed and polish".
hbn 3y ago
I thought that line was funny too. Speed and polish is rarely an additive change. You don't just copy-paste some "go fast" code over to the other code base!

ijustwanttovote 3y ago

I enjoyed the app. I was disappointed when they closed it because they couldn't find a revenue stream.

josefresco 3y ago

Not sure if I posted this before but Artifact reminds me of an app I use frequently (no association): https://www.boringreport.org https://www.boringreport.org They basically use "AI" to scrub the "emotion' and other garbage from the news.

freddealmeida 3y ago

I actually liked Artifact but it made two mistakes when launching. i) they limited access thinking people would be driven to join even after they fell off the news cycle. This was mistaken. No one wants to be limited on access. And when your business model is eyeballs, limiting them is ridiculous. ii) The over focused on design rather than content. Almost no one trusted it. And trust should have been the focus in the team. That yahoo is buying it is probably driven by the investors trying to get out of it. If you want to build a news app, with AI or not, then focus on deep investigation and truth and avoid propaganda. I'd join that. I'd pay for that. Otherwise, get your books in order to sell to another bullshit tech company that doesn't care about truth or reality.

redbell 3y ago

The shutdown announcement was discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612 Also, if you are like me, still have the Artifact app installed on your phone (Android, in my case) and launch the app. You will get a pop-up that reads: " To Our Artifact Users We've already shared our decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. You may have noticed that we kept our core news reading capability running a bit longer than planned - until April 2nd. While Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app or site, the proprietary Al-powered personalization technology and other features will live on and be integrated across Yahoo, including in Yahoo News, in the months to come. We think the technology Artifact has created will be even more impactful with the scale of the Yahoo News network. ranked the #1 news and information property in the US in 2023. Thank you to all who have joined us on this adventure we call Artifact. Can't wait to see how the technology we've built lives on through Yahoo. "

nikolay 3y ago

Nice! Otherwie my shared links would have died!

vvladymyrov 3y ago

I’m missing the app already. Somehow I’ve got highly addicted to the idea be click article summary feature of Artifact. There was something highly gratifying of scrolling through articles’ titles and getting bullet point summary and not scrolling and reading through gazzilion of ads and pop ups most of the articles have nowadays. Recommendation part was more subtle, but working for me - there few occasional that I’ve learn something useful or interesting to me… I would be grateful if somebody would suggest apps or service with similar article summarization functionality on a tip of users’ fingers.

lulznews 3y ago

So cash dump to buddies?