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 forgotten about. (Today, my clearest memory of Flipboard is that it didn’t “flip” on Windows phone, leading to a long series of jokes each time a new version was released. “Yeah, but does it flip?”)

To be fair, Flipboard isn’t bad. My big complaint is that it launches into a “For you” view that doesn’t appear to be customized for me in the slightest. And so I have to navigate to “Following” and then “Technology” to see the content I installed the app for in the first place. That’s two extra taps every time I launch Flipboard, at least once I memorize which of the icons in the toolbar is “For you.” Not a big deal. But it feels unnecessary.

Less problematically—and this probably something I could solve via customization—Flipboard seems to run out of new content quickly. I can return to the Google Discovery feed several times a day if not more, and often do, and it refreshes with new content each time. But Flipboard has an interesting hard stop on that, and each day, I run into stories I’d seen before. Not a dealbreaker, necessarily, and maybe I should be happy it’s so selective. But it feels limiting.

As January turned into February and then March, I rode it out with Artifact, expecting each day to be told that the end was nigh. That didn’t happen: Instead, Artifact just kept working. And not just working but working normally. The quality of this new feed still amazes me, but that also made it difficult to move on. Flipboard was there as a secondary option, one that I availed myself of most days. But I wasn’t looking forward to the transition.

And so I kept looking. Not actively, not all the time. But we’ve all done this type of thing in off-moments when you pull up a new tab in a web browser and start searching. Maybe this time will be different. You never know. (I’ve done this a lot over the past few weeks trying to find the ideal custom map service for an Eternal Spring book that my wife and I are working on too. So many rabbit holes.)

Between that work and the advice from some readers who were undertaking similar searches, I found at least two other promising options. They’re quite different from each other, and are arguably complementary.

The first is Bulletin (no website, oddly), an AI-powered newsreader that was created specifically because of the demise of Artifact. This one is currently (and maybe always) available only on the iPhone (and Apple’s other platforms), which obviously limits its appeal. But Bulletin was created by an individual, it doesn’t collect any personal data, and its use of AI is manifold. Yes, it curates the content you see based on your customizations, but it also tries to cull clickbait and provides decent daily summaries and individual article summaries. And the interface is clean.

The second is the awkwardly named feeeed. This one is more overtly an RSS feed front-end than Bulletin, but it builds on that basic functionality by letting you include content from your Gmail-based newsletters, YouTube channels, Reddit, and other content subscriptions and then bundling it all together into a single feed view.

Feeeed is interesting. But like Bulletin, it’s privacy-friendly and only available on iOS. And therein lies the problem: I’ve been using Android since I switched to the Google Pixel 8 Pro last November and then, temporarily, to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra two months ago. And this was the timeframe during which I recommended Artifact and then noted its pending demise. When I first tried to find alternatives, I was doing so on Android.

Everyone knows that Apple’s platforms are different, often in unexpected ways. And while I’ve touched on some of the weirdnesses of the differences occasionally, this is perhaps the second major example (for me) in which it’s come to a head. There’s something about the Mac, for example, that led to the creation of a silly number of Markdown-based text editors and note-taking apps on that platform, as opposed to Windows. And there’s likewise something about the iPhone that has led to the creation of a swarm of these pretty and useful feed readers, which in this modern era are now, of course, AI-based.

And I probably wouldn’t have noticed either of these new apps had I not, temporarily, switched back to the iPhone 15 Pro Max when my MacBook Air arrived a few weeks back. My goal was to test some of the cross-device benefits of Apple’s ecosystem, but in bringing my iPhone back up to date, I inadvertently stumbled into this brave new world. Curious.

Anyway, if you do use an iPhone, I recommend checking out both to see which, if not both, are a good fit. Note that both apps/services will benefit from some attention: I see a lot of CNET crap in both, for example, and will be exorcising that today. But both also surface information I’m not seeing elsewhere, and that is truly useful to me.

I wish one or both were available on Android. But it’s only a matter of time before similar apps appear there as well. Surely, the unwashed masses have this need too, right? In the meantime, let’s just hope that Artifact finds success in this second life. It’s still my favorite.