Can We Ever Escape The Feed?
A new AI-based feed focused on text content wants us to do a better job connecting over the news.
The Teardown
Friday :: February 3rd, 2023
In the earliest days, Instagram attracted users because of its nifty and sometimes-retro photo-editing features. Users applied filters to enhance colors, deepen shadows, or more ironically, add noise and borders to their photos as if they were snapped by actual Polaroid cameras. Facebook purchased the company and largely kept that core use-case intact. Today, even more sophisticated filters, tools, and alterations are a tap away. But in between today and that acquisition, Instagram grew its feed function. It juiced the importance of likes, followers, and other indicators of network importance. And it also tuned its feed to show posts from your follows that were algorithmically likely to engage you (like, comment, etc.), rather than in chronological order.
It should come as no surprise that the Instagram feed was retuned. After all, parent Facebook had done the same, leading to spectacular financial results over the intervening years. Of course, like many before them, Instagram founders Kevin System and Mike Krieger decided their minds were better aligned with other interests, and left Facebook. Instagram today still uses an algorithm feed, retuned again more recently to show posts from people you don’t follow that you might like. You can, really, never stop scrolling.
There are other products out there such as TikTok that capture and explosively enhance the virality of posts, but we’re still largely in a technology ecosystem in which algorithm social feeds grow based on images or videos. It all makes sense, of course. It’s easy to gawk at or admire a picture. It’s easy to watch a single one-minute TikTok, and then watch two-hundred more.
In the other corner is text. We have Twitter with algorithmic timelines, Reddit with subreddit and varying degrees of substance, and Y Combinator’s Hacker News with opinionated moderation and some intellectual substance, to name a few. More recently, Mastodon arrived to scoop up the dead bodies from Twitter and reinstantiate them away from the mess. Many of these communities - Hacker News the exception - support media in posts as well. But they’re fundamentally about text.
The problem with text is, well, that it requires reading. And if you look at the trends, we aren’t reading as much as in the past. I’m certainly not immune by way of this post. So, it was with some trepidation that I read about another new algorithm-focused network of sorts:
The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.
Artifact — the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence — is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.
The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text
So, the Instagram boys are back! Forget retro photos, the next big thing we don’t yet know we want is … algorithmic text?
I’ll cherry pick the previous quote a bit to highlight one specific bit:
Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.
When I squint at that collection of words, I conclude:
Artifact will watch what I read and send me other articles I might like
Artifact will empower me to engage my friends, colleagues, and internet sparring partners in discourse about the articles I read.
If all of this sounds familiar it’s because it really is. Those of us who read things, even infrequently, probably also send those things to sets of friends on occasion. And then we’ll talk about the content over group message or perhaps in person when we see each other. The process is quite organic and frankly lovely because of the inherent non-mechanized suggestion box. Groups contain and evolve into the people that are interested in posting articles and talking or spewing about them. Artifact’s innovation is, I think, to make friends better at suggesting interesting content to each other.
I don’t disagree with that specific idea. I’m for discovering better content. But, how well it work? The WhatsApp group that stimulates my intellectual mind the most is small - three people total. We probably discuss one topic per day on average, somewhat randomly, and certainly organically. And we’ve been non-Metaverse friends for many years. It would be hard to break me away from that group alone due to an aspiration for better content across my entire network, or some larger subset of it.
The Verge’s Casey Newton again references TikTok as an analog to Artifact:
TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.
Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing but for text.
Indeed, TikTok’s innovation is absolutely to show you stuff from people you don’t follow using lots of other data points. In fact, the platform works just as well without following anyone and instead simply scrolling through whatever shows up on your screen. You’ll like, save, and comment occasionally, and TikTok feeds all of that data back into whatever it shows you next. This works because, again, videos are relatively easy to watch.
Artifact’s launch suggests two things should happen:
The app will definitely suggest things I’ll read that I don’t yet know about
I’ll engage my friends about these things
It is the second point that doesn’t quite land for me. Today and looking at the foreseeable future, I’ll share the stuff that I find interesting over group message, text, or other targeted and personal medium. My friends are already there, over text, over group message, and etc. Suggesting that they join another app or community is a steep uphill effort. So, if it’s hard for me to push my friends into another network to have better conversations, is the app just another algorithmic newsfeed? SV companies often share a utopia in which everyone is perfectly and efficiently connected, but lots of us are doing just fine, thanks.
This contrast is what I’m interested to watch as Artifact evolves. TikTok works because you don’t need friends to use it. Twitter, in many communities, works because it is conversation only with the people you want to engage. Instagram, to its credit as a business, is turning towards TikTok rather than toward more engagement with friends. Said another way, it’s turning toward revenue maximization. Meanwhile, all of my iMessage, Signal, and WhatApp groups are sitting in the corner saying “hold my beer.”