Could Artifact get young people interested in real news?
Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who left Facebook in September 2018 a few years after the acquisition of their company announcing they were going to “take some time to explore their curiosity and creativity again”, are back, this time with an app, Artifact, designed for reading news.
Apart from the interest in the latest adventure of two founders who have shown great judgment and created an app that remains popular many years after its creation, Artifact is interesting for its choice of field: news reading, a hugely important habit that seems, unfortunately for society as a whole, to be losing relevance for younger generations and for many people who choose to simply “let the news find them” or “be filtered” through their social networks.
Artifact can now be downloaded from app stores after a period in closed beta. After downloading, it asks the user to choose ten news topics from a list, to also enter the media in which they have subscriptions to privilege them in the selection, and goes on to present a personalized list or feed of news in which it asks the user to select those that interest them to shape their recommendations and refine it progressively through the application of machine learning. The algorithm contains a personal part based on the articles — from the reading or selection of the first…
