[HN Gopher] Instagram's co-founders are back with Artifact, a ki...
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Instagram's co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok
for text
Author : gwill
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-01-31 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The future of social is fake people? I mean, they are right.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Someday they'll cut creation out of the loop and just train a
| model to consume your list of liked Tweets and generate more
| tweetlike text objects that resemble them. Then you'll just an
| endless feed of complete trash you can scroll down for the rest
| of your life.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| > A _personalized_ news feed _driven by artificial intelligence_
|
| Right!
|
| Then "enter your phone number".
|
| These people are probably jumping on the next bandwagon? I
| recently saw something like this -- I think it was post.news or
| so. Is it a new trend these days?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Post was a Twitter clone. Not a very good one either, I'm
| afraid. Isn't Twitter tiktok for text already?
| imaginationra wrote:
| [flagged]
| pryelluw wrote:
| So, Reddit?
| cyral wrote:
| I'm going to go against the grain here and say that this isn't a
| bad idea. Mobile Chrome has a similar feature that shows
| recommended articles on the new tab page, and it is surprisingly
| good at learning the topics you are into (from searches
| obviously). I often find new and interesting articles on there,
| similar to how TikTok manages to know what you like but also
| tries to give you new topics occasionally. This could introduce
| people to a lot of content that they otherwise wouldn't discover.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| I think calling it "TikTok for text" is the bad idea. Sounds
| like it's focused on traditional long-form writing not short-
| form content. The only part of TikTok they're trying to emulate
| is a recommendation algorithm that doesn't suck (and which
| every social media site should be trying to do).
| leonidasv wrote:
| I always get clickbait Medium articles and SEO garbage on my
| Mobile Chrome homepage. There's interesting content sometimes,
| sure, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very bad. I try to teach
| the algorithm by dismissing those low-quality posts, but they
| keep appearing.
| oblib wrote:
| I'm old, so maybe that's why I really can't see why we need or
| would want a text based "TikTok".
|
| EamonnMR already mentioned here "Isn't Twitter tiktok for text
| already?"
|
| I think he nailed it.
| runevault wrote:
| Which is funny because twitter bought and killed Vine which was
| well on its way to be Tiktok before Tiktok.
| oblib wrote:
| That is funny!
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Remember when companies bought small start-ups to bolster
| innovation instead of faltering it?
| razzimatazz wrote:
| How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning
| to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or
| connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and
| news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up
| things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my
| feed on your posts?
| msikora wrote:
| Wasn't this done already a few times? Mobile app only? Phone
| number to sign up??? Like "TikTok"????
|
| Hard pass...
| rcarr wrote:
| Over the past month I've started using RSS through a combination
| of ReadKit and Feedibin for everything I possibly can. YouTube
| videos, Reddit, Twitter, News Websites, Blogs, Newsletters. All
| of it, RSS. And it is absolutely fucking awesome. Some pertinent
| points:
|
| - My news addiction has dramatically declined in less than two
| weeks. I have a Feedbin action which automatically sets
| everything from Reddit, Hacker News, and news websites as read. I
| also utilise the Smart Folder functionality of ReadKit to exclude
| the same websites from the Today folder. This means I can click
| on these feed and have a look through it at my leisure but
| there's no pressure to 'get caught up' on everything.
|
| - As a result of the above, I am a lot more focussed and present
| and I am getting more shit done. I am wasting way less time
| mindlessly browsing low quality content and doomscrolling.
|
| - I no longer have to deal with a bunch of ads, cookie requests,
| email subscription popups and whatever else junk that is bringing
| the internet to the point where it's unusable.
|
| - Managing my email is now a joy. The only thing that goes there
| is correspondence, invoices and important account information.
| I've been unsubscribing to everything else as it comes in and
| keeping subscriptions to the newsletters I want to keep using the
| email address provided by Feedbin.
|
| - I use hnrss to handle hacker news and have a feed set up for
| replies to my comments which means I engage with people on this
| site better. I also have Front Page, Ask HN, Best Comments,
| Active etc all under one HN tag in Feedbin. I'm finding scrolling
| through this a better experience than just checking the Front
| Page, or the tabs separately.
|
| - I'm reading way more varied and better quality materials from
| individuals, blogs and specialist magazines rather than
| mainstreams journalists pushing politics and agendas.
|
| - As a result of all the above, the internet is FUN again. It
| feels like I've time travelled back 20 years to when the internet
| was full of unique and quirky webpages and you never knew what
| you was going to find. In reality it's been there the entire
| time, but social media, mainstream media, search engines and
| other massive corporations have pushed it out of site and sent me
| to sleep in order to earn money and purse their own agendas.
| Well, I am awake again and I will not be going back. And
| hopefully comments like this will help wake up others.
|
| You have to spend a little bit of time setting everything up and
| a few minutes each week tweaking things to keep it organised but
| it is absolutely worth the effort and the extra cost for the
| services.
| forgetcolor wrote:
| More accurate would be to call it TikTok for Links, not for text,
| as text without links isn't allowed.
| mfiguiere wrote:
| ProductHunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/artifact-4
| gwill wrote:
| it's just a private beta currently(https://artifact.news/), but
| i'm curious about details around privacy. I have a feeling that
| given their success selling instagram to facebook they'd lean
| into data harvesting. maybe i'm being pessimistic though.
| rchaud wrote:
| Wow, another walled-garden mobile app to fill your screen with
| algorithmically ordered blogspam.
|
| The article says it's "like Google Reader" except for the part
| where Google reader didn't take the liberty of filling your feed
| for you.
| jamiequint wrote:
| What did you do this week?
| ndneighbor wrote:
| Return of the king vibes here :)
|
| I am hoping this product really takes off. I do kinda see how
| this can fit the niche of a social RSS + recommendations.
| tchock23 wrote:
| There is a YC startup named Artifact. I wonder if the founders
| will defend the name like Instagram did with people using 'gram'
| in their name. That would be some nice karma.
| schmorptron wrote:
| There is also a (failed) card game by valve software of the
| same name.
| TillE wrote:
| I'm still baffled at how that game got almost rebooted and
| then just abandoned. The game wasn't perfect, the business
| model was a failed experiment, but it's something they
| absolutely _could_ have built into something fun, instead of
| flushing it all down the drain.
|
| Online card games are huge. Valve was _almost_ there.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| There are 11 startups named "Artifact", and lots more with
| Artifact in their name (e.g. Artifact Technologies)
| https://www.crunchbase.com/search
| tchock23 wrote:
| Ahh nice catch. Didn't realize it was such a popular name!
| phailhaus wrote:
| > Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote
| falsehoods, he says.
|
| They just never learn. This will not scale! But they refuse to
| hand over any control to users for choosing what they want to
| consume, or providing negative feedback.
|
| They're going to make the same mistake that all these platforms
| have made, which is to treat all content as if it's in one giant
| bag and hope they can ML their way through. There's no way to
| subscribe to a "feed" of related content, so your best bet is to
| follow some creators and hope that The Algorithm gets the
| message. How do I choose that I want to read more about science
| today? Or culture? Well, my only option is to hope that their ML
| team is good enough to maintain a reasonable ontology of subjects
| and good at classifying content automatically. But I'm completely
| out of luck if I have niche interests.
| oblib wrote:
| "Tiktok for literate people?" got flagged?
|
| Come on... that seems a bit heavy handed.
| antipotoad wrote:
| Having to give a phone number to join the waitlist is not so
| nice. Can't think of any _good_ reason not to accept an email.
| [deleted]
| mcast wrote:
| Why not? It allows the company to easily tailor its algorithms
| and content towards a user's political/religious/geographic
| views. Surely that would never be abused! /s
| squokko wrote:
| Easier for one person to spin up 1000 emails than 1000 phone
| numbers.
| taftster wrote:
| Really? That's crazy. At least at one point, spinning up
| phone numbers was significantly harder and much more
| deterrent against account generators than was email
| addresses. What has changed to make phone numbers easier to
| generate and email addresses harder?
| squokko wrote:
| Yes I typed it backwards
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| I think you mean the other way around?
| squokko wrote:
| Yes, edited
| ro_bit wrote:
| Luckily this seems to be one of the rare places on the internet
| where a VOIP number works
| mfiguiere wrote:
| Kevin's announcement tweet:
| https://twitter.com/kevin/status/1620466387063042048
| shapefrog wrote:
| Thats what kids want, more reading words.
| xnx wrote:
| Tiktok's features expand faster than other sites can copy them
| (successfully at least). In the past few months image slideshows
| (often heavy with text) have become a popular format on TikTok. I
| see no reason why TikTok wouldn't be the TikTok for text.
| claytonjy wrote:
| If they get banned in the US that's a solid moat for Artifact.
| yz_coding wrote:
| Isn't this essentially TouTiao?
| fatnoah wrote:
| > The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees
| as 'the future of social.'
|
| I see this as the anti-future. All I want from social (e.g.
| Facebook and Instagram) is a chronologically ordered list of
| things I chose to follow. That's it.
| miloignis wrote:
| That's what I want as well, and the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc)
| and RSS seem like the main things that fit that criteria. I
| don't use RSS for articles as much as I would like but I do use
| it for podcasts, of course, and the fediverse has been a fun
| experiment for me.
| 65 wrote:
| I want control over what I see.
|
| Democratic design instead of authoritarian design is the future
| of social media to me. I am long on Reddit because it allows
| you to subscribe to specific subreddits. I am long on RSS -
| which has seen a resurgence - because of the control it gives
| you over what you see.
|
| If only there was a "reddit for video" where I could see
| categorized videos instead of the garbage the YouTube algorithm
| gives me - of which I have almost no control over.
| password1 wrote:
| You know that joke that facebook is an over-engineered birthday
| reminder app? I would make the point that social media are also
| over-engineerd news feeds.
|
| The vast majority of people get their news from some kind of
| feed. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, whatever.
| Scrolling a feed is what gets news to most people. I can see
| the purpose of making an app that does just that, instead of
| having to also live with 3000 social features i don't care
| about (and all the noise and pointless posts they bring to the
| feed).
|
| I also don't agree on the chronologically ordered list of
| things i choose to follow. I tried to do that and as soon as
| you put any kind of news outlet it's going to flood your feed
| of things you don't care about. I want to follow TechCrunch,
| Ars Technica or The Verge, but you can be sure that I don't
| want to see every article they post. I just want to have them
| on my radar for that more noteworthy stories. And I also want
| to discover new things, trending articles or topic that might
| have nothing to do with what i specifically follow.
|
| That's why i also go on HN or reddit for news, because there's
| some kind of user curation where only the interesting articles
| ends up on my feed. I get to disover things that i don't
| already know and follow, plus i get curated news selection that
| should filter the noise while letting me know what's the hot
| topic of the week. But if the articles are selected by upvotes,
| then we have echo-chambers and both this site, reddit or any
| other social media are prime examples of this. You really get
| only a narrow and often biased slice. An app whose sole purpose
| is to give you news and articles you find interesting might
| have an incentive to do so without trapping you in a filter
| bubble. Or maybe not, only time will tell.
| miamowers wrote:
| I mean... isn't the solution just an RSS reader then? With like
| a system to recommend feeds if you want to get real fancy.
| cxr wrote:
| > algorithmic predictions
|
| So not an algorithm, then.
|
| Sucks that even tech people are bandwagoning right along with
| the popular media's corruption of the word so we're just saying
| "algorithm" to describe the antithesis of the historical use of
| that word.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_method#Definition>
| boredumb wrote:
| next the people will be asking to be able to right-click save a
| random meme
| jefftk wrote:
| You might like Mastodon, then? That's exactly what it offers.
|
| (That it only offers a chronological feed is the main thing I
| don't like about it, to the point that I wrote my own client to
| implement rudimentary prioritization)
| dgb23 wrote:
| RSS does that pretty well.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| That's cool. The engagement metrics show more usage and ad
| clicks when the feed is ML-driven, so that's what they're gonna
| give you. Thanks for playing.
| tormeh wrote:
| Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see
| content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my
| follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a
| flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than
| Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it
| also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the
| app at all.
| vonnieda wrote:
| I don't think this is true. I see "Boosted" posts in my
| feed from people I don't follow. Maybe this is a server
| specific feature? I am using Hachyderm.io.
| jefftk wrote:
| This is a standard Mastodon feature. You will see post
| that people you follow "boost", but not things they only
| "favorite".
|
| My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to
| separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give
| positive feedback to the post author".
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| yeah people can boost posts on mastodon (essentially a
| retweet), but you don't see the asinine algorithmic
| things like replies to people you don't follow (unless
| you go look for them)
|
| I _do_ like that there 's no reply component to boosts
| though. You boost it up or not. No sniping.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I love this about Mastodon. I hated that Twitter showed
| people who follow me what I was liking today, and I hated
| that Twitter constantly showed me stuff people I followed
| were liking.
|
| If I want my followers to see something, I have to
| consciously make a post that says "hey check out this
| thing". It's great! I open Mastodon, look at what the
| people I'm following are saying or pointing at, and then I
| _close_ it and get on with doing something else instead of
| spending half an hour being distracted by Shit Twitter
| Thinks I Might Like.
| ProAm wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good
| measure."
| jasmer wrote:
| Devil's advocate, I'm going to guess you do not want exactly
| that and you'd be happier with a quality alg.
|
| There is far, far too much information out there, and the
| things outputted from the things you follow is a 'decent start'
| but it's not what you want.
|
| Systrom is exactly right and better algs is what we need.
|
| TikTok is a great social medial platform, it's fun, irreverent,
| and the alg allows you to find niches in content that would not
| exist otherwise. I've found this guy who does videos on his
| sheep herding dogs, it's so fun to watch.
|
| Applying a great filter to all of my youtube/news feeds is one
| of the most meaningful ways to improve my content feed.
|
| Yes - we want to make sure people have the option to follow
| exactly what they want and hopefully to adjust the feed
| parameters ... but I would love to get rid of the fuzz in my
| feed.
|
| This is decent innovation and it could affect a lot of people,
| it's fine to be a bit sus but I don't think we should be
| cynical.
|
| You don't have to use it.
| fatnoah wrote:
| I guess this is my pessimism about an algorithm really ever
| working well for me. On FB and other social sites, I'm
| hesitant to engage any one-off content because my feed
| becomes flooded with it. I guess if I had more fine-grained
| control to say that I don't like something and WHY I don't
| like it, I'd have more confidence that this could be useful .
| seydor wrote:
| Humans are for training
| criddell wrote:
| It depends on how they choose to tune their algorithms. If they
| tune for "engagement" with an infinite scroll that the user
| doesn't have any control over, then it's probably going to be
| another thing that makes the world worse while making them
| wealthier.
|
| If they tune for quality, have a scroll that bottoms out when
| the next article no longer meets some high bar, and gives the
| user some control over the sources and presentation, then it
| could be decent.
| mbesto wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Ummm, one huge glaring difference - TikTok's content is user
| generated, Artifact's is not. Why this is being compared to
| TikTok is beyond me...
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Cool -- how do I get my blogs to be picked up by their algorithm?
| calo_star wrote:
| Sounds like Xiaohongshu without pictures to me.
| beauHD wrote:
| Another reason to use RSS. I am skeptical of something whose
| founders make money by mining users' data. This is yet another
| attempt to mine your data and reading habits, and there's many
| successful attempts at that already (Evernote, Pocket, Kindle,
| etc). I'm tired of these apps who nose around in your reading,
| and I don't care if it's powered by AI. AI will never replace the
| serendipitous scrolling I do with my RSS client.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Wasn't there a version of this in China that was the inspiration
| for TikTok?
| nikolay wrote:
| There's Twitter. There's Tumblr. There's Gab. There's Truth
| Social. There's Parler. There's GETTR. And we now have a decent
| Mastodon! Enough is enough! Stop fragmenting!
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Bold move to get into news aggregation. Silicon valley is
| littered with the carcasses of companies that's tried to make
| that a business.
|
| I'm not really sure enough people care to switch from their
| existing de facto aggregators, to make it pay through
| advertising. And news is a free commodity, so there's not much of
| a reason for a user to pay for it.
| asim wrote:
| The feed is one of the most dangerous inventions of modern times
| and now we're making it even more addictive. I really hope we
| stop to think about this at some point and realise we need to
| break away from this consumption format.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Do we do this with regulation? Or education? Trusting
| businesses to not do whatever they can to make money isn't a
| plausible strategy.
|
| People who can avoid social media will surpass their peers who
| are logging hours of mindless screen time. That will ultimately
| encourage even more inequality as people (especially kids) who
| aren't actively guided will easily fall into the social media
| trap and get left behind.
|
| Is the future just a bunch of narcissistic high achievers
| accumulating more and more wealth over a bunch of perfectly
| pacified low income workers?
| vagabund wrote:
| Purely algorithmic feeds work for TikTok because people want to
| shut their brains off when they use the app. It's like a drink
| after work. Copy-pasting that logic to longform text misses the
| differences in the mediums, and how people interact with them.
|
| When I'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not titillated.
| And part of being thoughtful is consciously choosing what to
| read.
|
| One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just
| archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the
| friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the
| experience from devolving into lowest common denominator
| clickbait.
| joegahona wrote:
| Exactly. The comparison also ignores the distinction that
| TikTok is user-generated, whereas this sounds like it's
| leveraging publishers. This is an insanely crowded space with a
| landscape littered with competitors: Apple News, Flipboard,
| Post.News, SmartNews, and so on.
| post-it wrote:
| It could work really well for short-form text. I'm addicted to
| reading comments. I even read your comment before reading the
| article. A feed with short articles curated to my interests and
| attention span would absolutely get me hooked.
| doctorM wrote:
| _One might say that sites like reddit and hacker news are just
| archaic versions of the same recommendation engine, but the
| friction is actually an important feature, and keeps the
| experience from devolving into lowest common denominator
| clickbait._
|
| I'm not certain about this seems like it would depend on the
| algorithm in question. In any case not certain I understand
| exactly what the friction you're referring to is, and how it
| helps devolution.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I used stumbleupon in the 0s and that was primarily blogposts
| and writings. I don't see why an algorithm couldn't recreate
| the stumbleupon experience.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When I 'm reading, I'm trying to be thoughtful, not
| titillated_
|
| Twitter.
| montagg wrote:
| And TikTok. It really depends what Tok you end up on, but
| there's plenty of corners of TikTok that are exactly the same
| mechanics as Twitter: quick bursts of infuriation that
| activate you and leave you wanting more. I think it's easier
| for a video-based content network like this (these are not
| social networks) to have content where you turn off your
| brain, like TV, than it would be with text. But they both can
| and are incentivized to do the same thing: titillate.
| jamescostian wrote:
| I'd argue that text has an advantage over video: speed of
| skipping past content you don't want. People don't talk
| anywhere near as fast as they skim headlines
|
| You're right about turning off your brain. But not everyone
| wants that thing turned off
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| To add:
|
| > The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a
| curated list of publishers ranging from leading news
| organizations like _The New York Times_ to small-scale blogs
| about niche topics.
|
| Not Twitter but many of these articles already have headlines
| catered to a certain method of consumption (aggregation done
| by Reddit, HN, etc.). I didn't need to read this article to
| know that Instagram's co-founders are making TikTok for text!
| vagabund wrote:
| Twitter only works because of the character limit. And even
| then the "for you" page is pretty bad and widely disliked, at
| least as a stated preference.
|
| This, if I understand correctly, is for articles.
| raman162 wrote:
| I would say that this can help with discovery of content that
| you're interested in. Similar to hacker news, just an
| alternative approach.
|
| I'm interested to try it and have joined the wait-list. I'm
| looking forward to how it differentiates itself from other
| article curation apps (Feedly, Google news, etc.).
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| interesting concept, but news? is that something people want more
| of?
| cloudking wrote:
| Sounds similar to https://mywaverly.com/
| hasbot wrote:
| Meh, I'll stick with Reddit and HN.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I'm perhaps being a poor sport but - give away
| my phone number - for an AI content app - described
| as TikTok for text - from the Instagram people -
| without even a screenshot
|
| just all feels horribly unappealing. I don't know why people will
| sign up, but I'm obviously not their audience.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| - who may well just sell out to Facebook again after a couple
| of years[1]
|
| [1] No shade - if Facebook offered me $billions for my user
| generated content site, I'd be at the bank quicker than you
| could imagine but I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me with
| user content again.
| makerofspoons wrote:
| I don't think there's any love between Zuckerberg and
| Instagram's founders: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features
| /2020-04-07/zuckerber...
| jollyllama wrote:
| Great, more name collisions for "artifact repository", "artifact
| generation", etc.
| jwmoz wrote:
| An algorithmic echo chamber.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| > and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an
| opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to
| take a run at text-based social networking again.
|
| In what way has Twitter collapsed? This sounds highly political.
| Which of course it is, because "a feed of text posts" is in no
| way innovative. The innovation is in the selective censorship.
| Orwellian.
| nickrubin wrote:
| Personalized news aggregators are "TikTok for text" now?
| philip1209 wrote:
| Consumer businesses are hard. Bootstrapping a network is hard.
| Taking attention away from competing apps is hard. Dealing with
| skeptics is hard.
|
| Yet, this team is one of the few that have succeeded at all of
| these challenges before.
|
| I'm excited to watch how they build this business. Success is
| uncertain, but observing their actions will be a case study in
| growth tactics.
| baxtr wrote:
| I agree. But I would like to add: ANY business is hard. Not
| only B2C.
| bmitc wrote:
| Are social media apps/platforms really B2C? Aren't they more
| B2B?
| hackitup7 wrote:
| They're fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is
| getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the
| consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is
| relatively easy. I won't say trivial, but I would guess
| literally 2-3 orders of magnitude easier if you have a
| large and engaged audience. B2C success is the rate-
| limiting step.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Agreed, the b2b part is simple. It's a lot of work, but
| it's something you can hire people to do and follow a
| playbook.
|
| There's no playbook you can run to make a social app go
| viral.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting
| the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers
| are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively
| easy_
|
| Social media is neither. Ben Thompson's aggregator aside
| from the B2C/B dichotomy shines in this example. Snap and
| Twitter notoriously struggled with ad sales, for example.
| ericmcer wrote:
| B2C is definitely a bigger technical challenge, B2B is a
| sales challenge.
|
| B2C people expect perfection for free and will balk at the
| slightest complication.
| recuter wrote:
| I wish Andrew Mason would come back.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| This could be cool if they source articles and blog posts from
| random places across the web, like StumbleUpon but with the
| modern ML that "works scarily well". Could be great for
| discoverability of smaller sites.
|
| Hopefully at some point they'll let me sign up with an email
| address though because I refuse to sign in with a phone number on
| principle.
| atonse wrote:
| My apologies to the team who I'm sure worked very hard, for
| sounding very sour. But I just had this visceral reaction to
| this:
|
| Come on guys, all of you smart people working at these places,
| doesn't anyone want to tackle a problem that might actually be
| difficult and meaningful to humanity rather than "how can I come
| up with novel ways to get people to be stuck on their phones for
| longer?"
|
| Sigh, at least Google in its heyday created the moonshots and was
| tackling real problems that mattered, self-driving, energy
| generation, robotics. Not just regurgitating the same old tired
| "___ but with text" "___ but with 6 second videos" ideas.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Judging by the emerging visceral hatred from society for people
| like Bill Gates and Elon Musk who have that stated goal of
| working to make a better world with their wealth and power and
| make a better present and/or future for humanity, why bother
| sticking your neck out like that?
|
| Keep your head down and give the masses more of the opiate that
| they keep demanding. /s
| atonse wrote:
| Even though I (and many others) have deeply respected Musk
| for all that he's done the last decade, he's gone and screwed
| it up with this idiotic distraction that is twitter. And in
| the process he's totally messed up his legacy.
|
| The visceral hate for Musk's actions in the past 6 months
| feels warranted. I'm annoyed as a Tesla owner that he's
| distracted with these silly things instead of staying his
| original course. Meanwhile Tesla as a company has completely
| stagnated.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| Actually, facilitating other people to communicate in novel
| ways in turn facilitates more people doing difficult and
| meaningful things across more mediums.
|
| It may as well be an economic model because demand of
| communication platforms is bringing out a supply of efficiency
| and not just addiction.
|
| If it's successful it's a net win.
| tormeh wrote:
| Allow me to be a bit nihilist: Nothing we do matters. In fact,
| if you ask why enough you'll realize meaning has no definition
| that is independent of an observer. So entertainment, as
| something humans value in and of itself, is perhaps the most
| worthy cause you can devote yourself to.
| acchow wrote:
| Perhaps some technology to help tackle some of the world's
| human suffering instead?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Oh but we have the technology for that already. We can nuke
| each other to extinction which may increase suffering
| momentarily, but will reduce it to zero in the long run ;)
| Gatsky wrote:
| Bryan Caplan's advice:
|
| "Stop paying attention to things that aggravate you unless (a)
| they _concretely_ affect your life AND (b) you can
| realistically do something about them. Start by ceasing to
| follow national and world news."
| [deleted]
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| to your point, i believe Google also funded 23andMe, which some
| understandably view as amassing private genetic information but
| which also surfaces huge-dataset-based actionable health
| insights for those using the service.
| nostromo wrote:
| For all the hate Musk gets, I love that he really does take on
| big problems. Gates too, obviously. I wish we had more
| billionaires like them.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| It's interesting that you bring up Google, a company founded to
| 'organize the world's information and make it universally
| accessible and useful.'
|
| Isn't that exactly what Artifact is doing (but instead of
| rules-based search algorithms, it's using stochastic ML
| models)?
|
| Is the problem that they are comparing themselves to Tik Tok?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| News consumption and news media in general is a major societal
| problem right now. Building a new way of consuming news is not
| as vapid a pursuit as it may seem at first glance.
| atonse wrote:
| And these guys are saying their app will identify
| misinformation and encourage people to find good information?
| moffkalast wrote:
| That may be true, but going towards even faster news and
| shortening our attention spans even more doesn't seem like
| the step in the right direction. More like just exacerbating
| the problem.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| I have. I received mostly derision and apathy from 98% of
| people
|
| https://qbix.com/platform
|
| https://intercoin.org/applications
|
| https://rational.app
| moffkalast wrote:
| > tackle a problem that might actually be difficult and
| meaningful to humanity
|
| > posts a link to a crypto ponzi scheme
|
| > mostly derision and apathy
|
| Gee I wonder why.
| EGreg wrote:
| Can you please describe how the ponzi scheme works? Seems
| you can just download open source software and use it
| without buying any tokens... and even if you did buy
| tokens, where is the ponzi?
|
| Many startups are "almost" ponzi schemes, where money from
| later stage investors keeps propping up a business that has
| negative unit economics, offen no revenues. Twitter made
| zero revenues when it was valued at $100M. Who paid the
| bills? Twitter has been losing money when Elon's group
| bought it. Who's paying the bills?
|
| On the other hand I am giving away software for free, that
| took 4 years to write, that I paid hundreds of thousands to
| a team I work with, and took jobs to do it. I give it away
| for free, you don't even LOOK at it and call it a ponzi.
|
| Yep, my description is accurate. The grandparent commenter
| asked:
|
| _doesn 't anyone want to tackle a problem that might
| actually be difficult and meaningful to humanity rather
| than "how can I come up with novel ways to get people to be
| stuck on their phones for longer?"_
|
| This is why. Capital talks. And capital is invested mostly
| in bullshit that can produce hype, not open source software
| that can change the world. I give it away for free and
| people can't be bothered to look unless there is hype
| around it first. You have your answer right here.
| miamowers wrote:
| Making my cursor constantly emit particles creates a visceral
| disgust in me, so like, stop that, and maybe you'll get a
| better response
| RGamma wrote:
| Yet another example that smart =/ wise.
| sethd wrote:
| Hopefully we haven't entered a "TikTok for X" phase in tech
| journalism.
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