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Artifact, the news app created by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down less than a year after its debut.In a post on Medium, Systrom announced the app’s shutdown and said that “we have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment.”The Artifact team was still quite small with only eight employees. Systrom noted that by shutting the app down now, that team would be able to spend time “working on newer, bigger, and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people” quicker.While the app will eventually go away, the team is starting that process by slimming things down. The first stage of that slim-down is the removal of the ability to add new comments and posts, a move that Systrom says is due to the amount of moderation that feature requires. Existing posts will; however, remain visible, and Artifact will continue to work as a new reading app through the end of February.Artifact was recently named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store.
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Systrom and Krieger left Instagram in 2018, six years after Meta (then Facebook) acquired it for $1 billion, citing difficulties with Instagram’s massive growth. They were just two of several founders who left their respective apps after being purchased by Meta, from Oculus co-founders Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey and WhatsApp’s Jan Koum.
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