> 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.
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!
> [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]
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.
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.
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.
I don't mean that his strategy is inspired by Thiel or even that Peter Thiel originated it: more that Peter Thiel happens to have written about this strategy as a standard play by the small guy. It makes sense that Pinboard/idlewords would attempt that. He's the small guy.
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".
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.
That seems to be the state of the industry everywhere.
YouTube does this on a extreme level as well. Just the other day I watched 3 videos in a row about the WRC Kenya stage after never watching anything related to rally or cars on my YouTube/Google account, an account I've had for almost 2 decades by now.
But, after watching those 3 videos, Google now thinks I'm all about cars, and 80% of all my recommendations are now WRC, F1 or other car-related videos. My other interests that they knew since before, are almost completely gone.
How can they screw up something so basic? Does anyone actually like things to work like this? Am I missing something super obvious?
This is imho one of the big draws and competitive advantages of TikTok. TikTok is by no means immune to this, but it handles it much better than Youtube or Instagram. It actively shows you some amount of content outside your current bubble, and reacts strongly to any signal you give it about that content (including watch time). It also seems to stop showing you topics when you show continued disinterest.
My Youtube has been ruined by my kid's shows. I literally have none of my interests showing up anymore because I've let them watch a few things.
I actually work on a recommendation team at a large content company and this has me realizing we don't really think about this ie how to build an overall profile that isn't impacted by one-offs. I think part of the issue is many models are black boxes without much explainability so it's not always clear or easy to understand why a model provided recommendations.
We just look to optimize for engagement so if our recommendations are driving more engagement, we dial into that. If they're not, we adjust course
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.
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.
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.
Google News, but with more content and some social integration baked in. A bit more personalized than Google News, but the quality was hit or miss (and a lot of news that was days or weeks out of date) and a lot of redundant/duplicative articles that was hard to reduce. Their algorithm favored political news over science based, no matter how hard I tried to push it in a less politicized focus.
“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
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.
"
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.
BTW, if anyone here is looking for a replacement to Artifact --
I've been working on 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.
If you can get the journalists to agree to stay off twitter than sign me up.
The amount of brain damage that site does to unwitting lazy journalists who think a teenage basement dweller clique of keyboard activists is the voice of a nation...
Right now its ads, as you may have noticed. We're looking to do more sponsorship deals, and then potentially explore a subscription model when we feel that we have enough to warrant it. (Though still keeping some free tier.)
The big thing for us, as former journalists, is to make sure we can get to a point where we can do a revshare back with the people doing the work -- the newsrooms/reporters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure. The site on arrival feels like an ugly PHP example app design from 2008. Use some AI-looking metallic gradients for logo, or anything less orangy-brown.
The use of AI-generated images for the news items is totally dystopian, freakish, and dysfunctional: hallucinated faces for obituaries, AI bias all over the place, surreal representations of things... But I like it! It's a strange feature on its own seeing how AI may (mis)represent a headline. Prompt it to use even more different visual styles, and apply filters (ie color filters) so that the UX doesn't become visually repetitive.
The news text underneath is just garbage, I don't get it. Work on putting out a good AI-generated summary instead, plus real links to real news sites that your LLM/ranker/classifier thinks are the best links to get that news, which will also give attribution for your sources. Bonus for summaries+links to social top ranked comments too. Get rid of snips within snips (which do not work).
Add a short sentence-summary under the headline, or make headlines longer when applicable so that they are more descriptive.
If you're looking for a replacement for Artifact (and for news apps in general), you should check out 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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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?
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.
I get the https://www.newsminimalist.com/ daily newsletter in my RSS reader. A few important news stories each day. Where important is decided by ChatGPT.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Not sure if I posted this before but Artifact reminds me of an app I use frequently (no association): https://www.boringreport.org
They basically use "AI" to scrub the "emotion' and other garbage from the news.
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.