From the Editor’s Desk: AI the News That’s Fit to Feed (Premium)

While the self-reported news of Artifact’s death was, in the end, an exaggeration, it was enough to trigger a new wave of news feed research. And I have some good news. Not only is Artifact sticking around for a while, but there are some other decent alternatives out there too.

This is a big deal: I spent years trying to find a news feed for personal technology that could replace top-tier but long-ago enshittified news apps like Google News And I had always come up empty until I found Artifact, a service that’s so good it’s almost uncanny. And then, like most things I love—this happens to me a lot with favorite restaurants—it left me. Or, said it was going to. And then didn’t, thankfully.

Artifact and apps like it are necessary because “news” apps, what I think of as new feeds, newsreaders, or news aggregators, have been spinning around the enshittification toilet bowl waiting for that final flush just like so much else in personal technology these days. And for the same reasons: An app that actually delivers the news you want to see might be useful to you, the customer, but the companies that provide this service have more selfish goals related to profits. And so they are putting their needs in front of yours, ruining their own apps, and speeding a decline in quality across our entire industry while doing so.

Google News is notably bad. If there was a way to earn money doing this, you could make a career out of trying in vain to customize Google News—or the related Google Discovery feed—by telling it your likes and dislikes. The problem is, you’re just spitting in the wind. Google will simply keep feeding you crap because it’s in their best financial interests to do so.

We see this same issue, but multiplied, in Microsoft’s even more woeful Discovery feed inside the Widgets interface in Windows 11. This horrific experience takes the enshittification we see in Google News, says, “hold my beer,” and then takes it to the next level by forcing all navigation to occur in Microsoft Edge, channeled through Microsoft websites that exist solely to republish third-party content, all backed by Microsoft tracking and Microsoft advertising. It’s the apex predator of enshittification, or it would be if it weren’t so easy to ignore. (Especially now that you can turn off the feed in Widgets. Thanks, EU!)

Sorry, I got a bit carried away there. But my newsreader issue hits at the nexus of two things I care about greatly, technology and good writing. It’s a one-two gut punch of enshittification.

When Artifact announced that it was giving up the ghost, it gave users a few months to find a replacement. And so I did just that, if begrudgingly and with little enthusiasm. After all, I had failed so many times in the past. Not surprisingly, my initial findings were bleak. The best choice I came across was an old chestnut, Flipboard, which like many I had used on and off over the years and then kind of forgotte...