An Interview with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger About Artifact

I do believe in this idea that you shouldn’t have to click, “Follow,” we should just learn that you want to follow.

It turns out that a lot of people really like to read. I joke with Mike that there’s this earned secret that everyone thinks no one likes to read. Everyone’s like, “Oh, there’s this shift to video.” And it’s like, “Yes, video is growing in terms of time spent” but it turns out people really like to read. Now, do they read the full article? Not alwa

I think a lot of the value of great reporting or great content online comes from the personality or the perspective. It’s the writers that I keep coming back to over and over and over again on a topic and sure, maybe GPT-4 is going to be able to mimic the ideas well enough that it’s hard to tease them apart. But in general, there are either source

I think all social networks start off as a utility and blossom into social networks long term, and that’s because they earn the right to be a social network, not because they start as a social network. That’s kind of where I think we are, is this utility phase where we’re trying to be as good as possible for our beginning users and we’re going to

But going forward, it turns out that not every article has to be written by a person. And I’m very excited for the world where if you are really interested, we were talking about anchor products before, wouldn’t it be great if you just woke up and there were a custom article written for you? And to call it an article, I think is probably saying it’

But then we could do things — we had a principal called Do the Simple Thing First and it’s funny to think about doing that when you have millions or even a billion users, but even our ad tech, we know we couldn’t integrate right at the beginning just because the systems were different. So v1 was manually insertion, not even programmatic selling wi

If we get big enough, there’s a real consideration on how we train the algorithm and what objective function we get or give it, and what content gets produced for it. We need to be very mindful of that because what I’d rather have is a world where we have more original content, more interesting content, and less of this gaming-the-algorithm content

I think we are trying to build a company that serves the people that use it rather than serves the company that we founded.