The Artifact team announcing the news via their Medium blog:
We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.
On one hand I'm dissapointed that an app that I enjoy to use will soon be no more. On the other hand, it's not really surprising. I found it to be a great way to surface content that I was interested in (although the quality did drop in recent times), however the reading experience in the app wasn't the greatest. Even so, it still made my "Software I’ve Enjoyed in 2023" list last year.
I assume this is the case for other people as well, but at least for myself, I would have used the service a lot more if it had some form of web interface.
Also, isn't it a bit weird that this news was posted on a Medium blog? I can understand wanting it in a more permanent place outside of the actual Artifact app, since that will soon stop working. But Medium? Not their own artifact.news domain, or even just a blogging platform with a better reading experience than something like Medium. Maybe that sort of decision shows why the app was like it was.