Instagram co-founders shut down their Artifact news app

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New Delhi. Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who launched AI-powered news aggregator app Artifact a year ago, announced it was ceasing operations on Saturday.

He explained the reason for this by saying that the market opportunity was not large enough to guarantee continued investment.

“It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making difficult decisions early is better for everyone involved,” Systrom, who is the app’s CEO, said in a blog post.

The Artifact app was recently named Everyday Essential App of the Year by the Google Play Store.

The company has decided to remove the ability to add new comments and posts.

The CEO said, this type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff to support these features in the future.

However, existing posts will continue to be visible to users on their profile self-view. Meanwhile, Artifact will continue to operate the core news-reading capability until the end of February.

We are in an existential moment where many publications are closing or struggling, local news has almost disappeared, and large publishers’ relationships with leading technology companies have deteriorated, Systrom said.

He said, I hope that technology can find ways to support, preserve and grow these institutions and that these institutions can find ways to take advantage of the scale that things like AI can provide.

The shutdown came amid a slowdown in usage of other news aggregators such as SmartNews.

–IANS

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