Instagram Founders’ Social Network Bites the Dust
Artifact, Instagram founders’ venture, faces closure, revealing challenges in merging social and news platforms. The evolving landscape prompts introspection.
In a surprising turn of events, Artifact, the ambitious news aggregator turned social network created by Instagram co-founders, is set to shut down.
The announcement came through a blog post on Friday, revealing that the startup had decided to wind down operations.
According to Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, the market opportunity was not significant enough to justify continued investment.
Artifact had initially started as a SmartNews-like news reading app but underwent rapid transformations, evolving into a curation and news discovery platform.
Users were empowered to become creators by finding and sharing interesting content from around the web.
The platform also integrated several AI tools for news summarization, headline rewriting, and content curation. However, these changes seemed to have diluted the original value proposition of the app, transforming it into something more akin to a Twitter replacement.
In the blog post, Systrom acknowledged that startups often fail to recognize market realities, emphasizing the importance of making tough decisions early on. He stated that the biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger, and better things that can reach many millions of people.
While expressing excitement about continuing to build new things, Systrom recognized that only time would reveal the nature of those ventures.
To ease the transition for users, Artifact will gradually shut down various features, starting with the ability to comment and make posts. Existing posts will remain visible for the time being, and the app’s core news capability will continue to operate until the end of February.
The decision to close Artifact comes at a time of increased competition in the Twitter rival landscape, coupled with a slowdown in the usage of other news aggregators like SmartNews. SmartNews faced challenges in 2023, experiencing layoffs and a CEO replacement, while its app witnessed a decline in downloads and active users.
The changing landscape of how users find news, driven by the advent of AI, has contributed to this slowdown. Publishers, too, are grappling with their content being incorporated into AI training data, leading to legal battles and licensing deals.
One of Artifact’s key challenges was the lack of a clear identity — it struggled to define whether it aimed to be a Twitter-esque conversation and discovery platform, a Pinterest rival for discovering interesting links, or an AI-powered news engine. This ambiguity likely hindered the platform’s ability to capture users’ attention, as they were unsure of how Artifact could fit into their daily workflows.
Despite the setback, Systrom remains optimistic about the future of news and information, asserting that these areas continue to be critical for startup investment. He believes that other “bright minds” are actively working on innovative ideas in this space.
Systrom previously discussed the role of AI at Artifact during the fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. A video of this talk is available, providing insights into the challenges and aspirations that the team faced in their attempt to revolutionize the news and information space.
