Can we ever build TikTok for Text

A month ago Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the Instagram co-founders, launched Artifact. It's a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to learn what you like and serve popular articles from a curated list of publishers. People call it a TikTok for text. Tap articles that interest you and it will serve similar posts and stories in the future. Google's Home feed, Facebook's Suggested for You, and Apple News all tried versions of this. Even I tried once. None has been as successful as TikTok at creating an engaging and addictive user experience.

I most admire Systrom and Krieger, but it's a flop this time. They attempted to solve the need for more good reads in recent days by recommending good texts, but I see that as an inherent problem of reading texts. Reading and parsing an article takes way more mental energy, so text apps struggle to be as engaging as video apps like TikTok.

People have tried plenty of fixes.

• Chat interface. Hooked and other chat-like ebook services tell stories in short text-message chunks.
• Summary Bot. TLDR bots that summarize news articles automatically.
• Interactive Articles. Interactive components like touchable graphs and scroll-reacting elements to make text more engaging and interactive.
• Illustrations. Hire an illustrator or use generative AI to create visuals for text-based content.
• ... Or Give Up. Run a short-form YouTube or TikTok channel full time instead of trying to make texts more engaging.

Right now Artifact is fundamentally not different from any other news app. All internet companies now have some algorithmic recommendations, and I felt Artifact was no better. They should've done something more breaking, like a NewsGPT.

Maybe Systrom and Krieger are bibliophiles who wanted to bring back the beauty of long-form text. I agree. I'm a bibliophile too. But we must understand that the notion of texts changes over time. In Confucius's time texts were cryptic and poetic, and writing and distributing commentary was largely forbidden because it undermined critical thinking. They will gasp at modern books' detail and kindness if they read them.

Some might also see a modern, practically illiterate generation that can't finish a single book in one sitting as the undermining of human intelligence. I also lament shortening attention spans, but this is a current of history we can't alter by pure will. We need to learn to coexist with these changes in human media and preserve intelligence, as in 효과적 가속주의.