The Internet’s Oldest Living Dinosaur Buys Artifact

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Artifact and will integrate its AI-based news aggregation capabilities into Yahoo News. This is a worst-case outcome for fans of the service, and Yahoo has already killed the standalone Artifact mobile app.

“We built an intuitive product experience that users love and has the opportunity to benefit millions of people,” Artifact CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom said. “Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever. AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about. Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”

I could not be less excited: Artifact was a special app, impossible to replace, and it is a weird coincidence that I happened to write about how the app had unexpectedly continued operating after its originally planned end just yesterday: As it turns out, Artifact had, in fact, secretly concluded its deal with the devil just days earlier. I can’t think of a worse end for Artifact than Yahoo, a sort of vestigial leftover from the original World Wide Web of the 1990s, a company that exists today only because of inertia.

Artifact co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger had previously co-founded Instagram. Given how poorly that service turned out, they will of course now work with Yahoo in an advisory capacity during this transition.