An Interview with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger About Artifact

I like the way Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom put it when discussing the recent launch of his news recommendation app Artifact. “[B]uilding the algorithm is enormously editorial. Because what you choose to train your algorithm on—the objective function, the data you put in, the data you include, the data you don’t include—is

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What’s fascinating, though, and I alluded to this earlier, is that it’s a fluid community. We have a community where creators come in. We have creators who are designers, artists, musicians, and businesspeople. They dynamically form teams in our community. As studios, they produce an experience and then can reform into other teams. It’s an evolving... See more

I think there's this idealized version of modern interactions where, especially in the context of startups, where there's this idea that you'll make something, you'll drop it or release it, and then you'll distribute it to thousands and millions of people. And I think what's actual, and the thing that's much more effortful, but much more human too,... See more