More earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974612
(Actually, I turned _them_ off, and promptly forgot about the app over a year ago.)
While it's far from the only app that offered a reader mode, its implementation handled some of the more esoteric news sources (with disruptive layouts) better than the others I've tried. But the feature I will miss the most is title rewriting ("mark as clickbait") which I now hope to see as a feature on all my "reader" class apps (news, email, etc).
Great work, and kudos to the team.
Services like Artifact, which show news articles from a variety of sources do not mesh well with either of these larger markets. An older market who prefers their singular news source does not want to read news from anyone they don't trust. And the younger market aren't fans of specifically just reading news. It's usually peppered in with posts from friends, or it's trending and has a large discussion on Twitter/X.
So the market becomes limited to people who get their news from various sources and prefer absorbing their news at specific times and in specific ways. In the American market, I believe it's just too small of a market to become profitable.
They made the unconventional choice of using Clojure: https://github.com/plumatic
Chinese users grew up on everything being app content, traditional media is just an input like any other that agglomerators consume and then present algorithmically to users, everything is completely mixed between user generated content and news stories and there's no particular notion of news or journalism as a distinct entity.
You can aggregate as much shit as you want but unless you’re using it to manufacture fertilizer it’s still just shit, and that’s before even going into the content of what passes as news nowadays.
Unless you’re doing your own journalism, you can only curate and paraphrase other news sources, right? Social media takes care of that, at least if you find and follow good curators, but this app’s recommendation system is unlikely to be better than social media’s.
I’d you are doing your own journalism, good for you. But unfortunately that’s very hard especially if it’s not local (and if it is local, good for you again. Boston Globe is somewhat an example of this, perhaps unsurprisingly it’s very expensive for news).
Anyone know any good alternatives? I tried Ground News at launch and found it far too chaotic though I like the novelty of the unbiased model
Both seem to require way too much effort to get a good feed together, though, and neither has artifact's killer AI clickbait replacement feature.
I wish Artifact didn't have the infinite scroll of news. I would have preferred just seeing the latest news and then stop, not allow me to see news from 2 months ago.
Some categories were also lacking and consisted of mostly low-effort articles. I thought the Ai would have gotten rid of those based on my effort of blocking them, or marking them as not interesting, but the Ai was still pushing them into my view.
Adding streaks was a misstake in my opinion, as someone else mentioned, Artifact sometimes went against their purpose of the app.
Otherwise, I thought the app had a lot of potential. Had they only integrated more local news, I would have used it a lot more!
In 2009, Larry Ellison(Oracle founder) was making fun of cloud[0] because everyone was on a cloud hypetrain.