When Artifact first emerged in January, the app required a phone number and an invite to try out, which drove initial demand. But it also kept the app out of the hands of many potential users in the near term — the company says the waitlist included around 160,000 sign-ups. Even with an invite, users outside the U.S. couldn’t necessarily try Artifact, because the sign-up required a U.S. phone number.
That all goes away today, the Artifact will be instantly usable upon first launch. In fact, you’ll not need to enter a phone number at all, unless you want to create an account to port the Artifact to a new device.
System explains the delay in launching publicly was not just about generating consumer interest in the Instagram founders’ next big thing, but also because the underlying technology requires a certain amount of data and a number of people using it to offer the best experience. As a few weeks have now passed, the company believes the app is ready for a larger audience.
With today’s launch, Artifact will now give users more visibility into their news reading habits with a newly added stats feature that shows you the categories you’ve read as well as the recent articles you read within those categories, plus the publishers you’ve been reading the most. But it will also group your reading more narrowly by specific topics. In other words, instead of just “tech” or “AI,” you might find you’ve read a lot about the topic “ChatGPT,” specifically.
In time, Artifact’s goal is to provide tools that would allow readers to click a button to show more or less from a given topic to better control, personalize and diversify their feed. In the meantime, however, users can delve into settings to manage their interests by blocking or pausing publishers or selecting and unselecting general interest categories.
Also, new today is a feature that allows you to upload your contacts in order to see a signal that a particular article is popular in your network. This is slightly different from Twitter’s Top Articles feature, which shows you articles popular with the people you follow, because Artifact’s feature is more privacy-focused.
“It doesn’t tell you who read it. It doesn’t tell you how many of them read it, so it keeps privacy — and we clearly don’t do it with just one read. So you can’t have one contact and like figure out what that one contact is reading…it has to meet a certain minimum threshold,” notes System.
This way, he adds, the app isn’t driven by what your friends are reading, but it can use that as a signal to highlight items that everyone was reading. In time, the broader goal is to expand the social experience to also include a way to discuss the news articles within the Artifact itself. The beta version, limited to testers, offers a Discover feed where users can share articles and like and comment on those shared by others. There’s a bit of a News Feed or even Instagram-like quality to engaging with news in this way, we found.
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