Artifact wrote on Medium a post titled “Introducing Artifact Comments”. It was written by the Artifact Team.
…Creating a positive community is also important to us; we want to build a respectful medium where everyone feels free to participate. To accomplish this, we’re introducing reputation scores for all commenters based on a variety of factors.
Community members have the ability to upvote and downvote comments – both of which will increase or decrease your reputation respectively. The score represents the earned trust from the community and will help you weigh people’s opinions and help us filter out bad behavior. You can read our Community Guidelines to learn more about the best practices for thoughtful conversation on Artifact.
What’s Available Now:
Create a profile. Anyone can now create a public profile with display name, photo, and bio. Profiles are required to participate.
Comment on any article. You can now access comments from any articles to see what people are discussing or to leave your own thoughts.
Upvote and downvote. You will be able to upvote or downvote comments to help moderate the discussion and bring attention to the most insightful and valuable contributions.
Earn Reputation. You gain reputation when your comments are upvoted or you add a photo or bio to your profile. You lose a small amount of reputation when your comment is downvoted.
Stay Connected. We’ll let you know when your comments get upvotes or replies, or people in your network add a comment.
TechCrunch reported that Artifact the recently launched personalized news app from Instagram’s founders, is launching a key new feature: a social discussions component. Previously in private testing, the feature introduces a way for users to comment and engage in conversations around news articles they’re reading on the service. With this update, all Artifact users will now see comments on articles, the company says.
According to TechCrunch, to leave a comment of your own, Artifact users will have to first create a profile on the service – a relatively simple process that requires you to add and verify your phone number. This initial step will help mitigate spam, the company notes.
These display names are not unique, which means no one has to fight over their name as they did on Instagram. While Artifact will encourage people to use their full names, it will allow pseudonyms.
Artifact says it will address moderation in a couple of ways. For starters, it will give each new profile a “reputation score” that’s based on community upvotes and downvotes on users’ comments. This is similar to Reddit’s voting mechanism, or even Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking feature, but with the addition of an actual, visible score that is displayed to users.
Gizmodo reported that users who want to leave comments on articles on Artifact will have to create an Artifact account and add a verified phone number. Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, who started Instagram together, said in a press release the app is requiring users’ phone numbers in an effort to curtail spam and moderate content.
Ideally, Systrom said he believes these protections should help prevent the platform from devolving into a toxic cesspool like other prominent news sharing apps. Krieger said the app encourages users on the platform to use their real names though they can still use pseudonyms, according to Gizmodo.
I think the creators of Artifact need to proceed very carefully. They seem very hopeful that everyone on the platform will “play nice”. However, it is also entirely possible that bad actors will come to Artifact specifically to cause harm to other user’s reputation score. I hope they hired plenty of moderators.