Chris MessinaThe reality of Kevin Systrom's Artifact is coming into focus now that you can follow writers on the platform.
This will become a direct competitor to Substack and Medium, and maybe even outlets like the NYT.
Marcello Bastéa-Forte@chrismessina the main reason I can’t use it for long is lack of adblock. Most sites it loads are completely unreadable
@marcello3d I almost always use Reader Mode and their AI summarization to avoid that problem.
@chrismessina ya ditto but feels broken that you have to every time
@marcello3d I don't disagree but Systrom said that that experience is what allows publishers to publish their content "for free", so won't automatically enable adblocking.
Artifact's support for signing in to paywalled services is helpful.
@chrismessina for sure. feels like there’s a mismatch. clearly the publishers want me to look at the unreadable website, I’m clued in enough to know I can bypass it but they’re betting on most people not or not caring. I’d rather just pay and not deal with it, but I can’t realistically do that separately for every single publisher, so I don’t know what the solution is (mine is I forget to open artifact and just use a web browser)
@marcello3d Right. Well, this is the "subscription overload" concern.
Most publishers throw loads of ads on their websites because the content is really for the machines — search engines. And because most people still browse/access the web signed out, you're right that those are the folks who "pay" (in their attention) to subsidize your access.
It's a gnarly problem.