Instagram's co-founder has a new idea

Kevin Systrom thinks users want value, not a "digital fistfight." The news business sucks. Why does Instagram’s co-founder want to get into it? Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom thinks that the social media industry is ready for something new. Major social media platforms have become better than ever at capturing our attention by optimizing their algorithms to entertain us with viral videos and funny memes. But while people are consuming more content, they’re posting less, according to Systrom. “People have flocked to services like TikTok or Twitter or Facebook less to connect with their friends ... and more and more to be entertained,” Systrom said. He added, “I think people want value and entertainment, but they don’t want to be in the middle of a digital fistfight.” Systrom, along with fellow Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, [sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012]( and continued [working at the company until 2018](. Now, Systrom thinks there’s an opening for a new kind of engaging app that can better inform the public. That’s [why in January,]( Systrom and Krieger launched [Artifact](, a personalized, social news reader — although it’s not just for news, Systrom says — that shows you high-quality written content, recommended to you based on AI. It’s been called a “TikTok for text” because much like the popular video sharing app, it’s designed to predict what to show you based on detailed insights about what you’re looking at, what your interests are, and what you’re clicking on. Systrom hopes Artifact can help solve a major problem: how to help writers reach interested readers at a time when the online advertising industry is facing a slump, Facebook is [backing away]( from news, and [AI-generated content is threatening]( to upend the news industry and blur the line further between what’s fake and what's real. “If feels like smart people should insert themselves into existential crises for the world — and hopefully we qualify as relatively intelligent, having done something in this world before on social,” said Systrom. Part of Systrom’s plan, he says, could be to eventually allow independent publishers to post on the platform, rather than just major media organizations. “The internet is this wonderful place where potentially anyone can be a publisher, just like anyone can be a creator on TikTok or a photographer on Instagram,” Systrom said. “And it feels like that opportunity is untapped.” But the business of written words — especially news articles — is a notoriously difficult one compared to, say, funny meme videos. Artifact will face tough competition from apps like TikTok to hold our attention. Newspaper articles and magazine features “may not make you laugh as much” as video, Systrom said, but the text medium is “enormous in terms of its effect on society.” That’s why he’s trying to figure out a way to make it work. Systrom and his team will also have to figure out how to avoid repeating the mistakes of social media’s past when it comes to letting [harmful or misleading content]( go unchecked. Artifact has a [content moderation policy]( that bans things like hate speech. The company says that isn’t too much of a problem so far because the app hand-selects which publishers are shared on the platform, and they select for high quality. But Artifact recently started allowing comments, which opens it up for more content-moderation problems. One way to mitigate that is the app assigns users Reddit-inspired [“reputation scores”]( based in part on how much other users upvote someone’s comments. In a far-ranging interview, Systrom reflected on his time working in the social media industry, saying that one of the things he was “always questioning” was whether he was “providing value to people.” Now, Systrom is hoping that Artifact will help bring meaningful articles to people’s attention, whether that’s from independent writers or major publications. “When people engage with the service, are they learning something new? Are they being more informed?” Systrom said. “And the second time around ... hopefully, by us doing our job right, people will learn more about the world, and they’ll be more informed citizens.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You were one of the pioneers of early social media. What do you make of the social media landscape right now? I think that there are two forces. On the corporate side, companies have gotten very good at figuring out how to get your time. They’ve been optimized by engagement algorithms. Basically the single goal is: how do you spend more time on the service? And unsurprisingly, that has led to the type of content that optimizes the system being perhaps more entertaining, more inflammatory, and basically just more engaging. And I think what you see is people have flocked to services like TikTok or Twitter or Facebook less to connect with their friends and more and more to be entertained. Basically, all of these things have moved to one giant entertainment network. And on the other side, I think consumers are starting to raise their eyebrows, because I think they want two things, I think they want value, and I think they want stability. The value is: I’m spending all this time, what am I getting? Do I get a laugh? Am I learning something new about the world? Am I seeing something I wouldn’t have otherwise? And the stability part is interesting, probably more so in the last five years or so. I think people want value and entertainment, but they don’t want to be in the middle of a digital fistfight. They don’t want to be the target of someone else’s unbounded anger, or they don’t want to put themselves out there, take a risk to try to make a funny video, and get put down. And to me, the side effects of that are that it’s largely driven people into “consumer mode” rather than “producer mode.” So people are consuming vast amounts but are producing far less than they used to. They want the value but they don’t want to necessarily interact with a bunch of other people. They don’t want to put themselves out there and be taken down with a bunch of replies and tweets. And by the way, the people that are immune to this — like if you think of this as a system, if you start out with everyone just producing, the people that are immune to other people’s feedback and other people’s attacks, they’re usually not the people you want producing content because they’re the ones that will produce with impunity, and chat with impunity. And I think that leads to a certain type of content dominating these networks. It also means, on the consumption side, the algorithms are fairly focused on driving time spent. People who get really good at optimizing videos for time spent are the ones that get the most distribution, and those are the creators. You have to be a professional to be that good. You can’t just be anybody. So anyway, wrapping up those two forces — the drive toward extreme engagement optimization, and on the consumer side, wanting more value and wanting stability while you extract that value — leads there to be a bunch of people who are trying to do new and interesting things. Also, just like the context around this is you have a very large company and Meta, who has been extremely successful dealing with disruptions on the outside. You have an international player in ByteDance, trying to figure out if they can succeed in the United States and maintain a business in the United States long term. You also have Twitter, which is now run by a very different person than it used to be run by with very different values and ways of working. So I can’t tell you exactly what will happen. But I guess my rule of thumb in business is out of turbulence, out of disruption, new things rise. And I think that AI kind of coming into its own, rather than being just this buzzword we all use — that turbulence plus AI feels like a bunch of really interesting things are about to happen. That’s my long answer. 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