Nowadays, the news we have access to is constantly changing and evolving. So when Artifact, the personalized news app launched by Instagram founders, introduced their new feature of social discussion, the internet took notice. The feature allows users to comment on articles they’re reading as well as engage in conversations around them.
To be part of this conversation, users are required to create a profile on the service. This keeps them from having to battle for their name as they did on Instagram and encourages them to use their full name. However, pseudonyms are still allowed.
The new feature on Artifact has transformed it from a personalized news reading experience to more of a “social network around news”. This puts it in direct competition with larger platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, who also provide similar services.
Before introducing the new feature, Artifact already gave users the opportunity to see which articles were popular with their network, though without being able to identify the users who were reading them.
To ensure quality is maintained and malicious actors are held at bay, Artifact has implemented a scoring system based on community upvotes and downvotes on user comments. This is similar to Reddit’s voting mechanism or Twitter’s Blue subscription feature “Top Articles”, with the difference of the visible score being displayed to all users. Furthermore, AI models are utilized to detect anything that falls out of compliance with their Terms of Service, which will then be dealt with accordingly.
The two founders behind Artifact, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, have shown with this feature how incremental changes can completely revolutionize the way we perceive news. Systrom himself explained that he believes the most interesting thing about news is being able to share and discuss it with others, a belief Artifact is taking seriously and bringing to life with this feature.
For now, users can access the app free of charge while it’s in its early development stages and they may also be able to monetise with revenue shares with publishers in the future.
No matter what, Artifact is sure to have a major impact on how news and information is shared. And with the new addition of a discussions feature, users can now join a new and interactive discussion surrounding news and benefit from the knowledge of their peers.
