Artifact Is Shutting Down ⇥ medium.com

Kevin Systrom announced the decision to shut down Artifact on Medium:

While we’ve made this decision, we wanted to make sure that we allowed the community time to adjust. So, today we’ve decided to slim down the app’s complexity and operations by removing the ability to add new comments and posts. This type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff going forward to support these features. Your existing posts, however, will remain visible to you on your own profile self-view. In the meantime, Artifact will continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February.

Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Artifact last January, but I did not get into using it until — and this is true — earlier this week. It is unfortunate this did not pan out as successfully as Systrom and Krieger’s last idea.