The articles displayed in the app are sourced from news sites and are available without payment or subscription requirements. (Yahoo News works with over 1,000 publishers who are compensated through revenue-sharing agreements. It’s like Spotify, but with news.)
Getting started requires minimal effort. Once launched, the app will ask you to select five or more topics that interest you, such as politics, science, games and climate. From there, a combination of algorithmic curation and human consideration from the editorial staff at Yahoo News determines what you see. Additional customization options let you block specific posts or keywords if you never want to see them in your feed again. (For example, something like “Elon”).
Downs Mulder says what you see in the novel Yahoo News app is the result of a careful balance of artificial intelligence and editorial decision-making. It’s tailored to your interests while also featuring a Top Stories section, which shows what Yahoo considers the most significant stories of the day. These are decided through a symbiotic process, where artificial intelligence flags stories that seem to have greater importance or interest to users, and those in editorial positions at Yahoo News decide to include the stories that seem most significant. The team also wants the app to be non-annoying, and Yahoo says it deliberately determines which notifications bother you.
“People want places to spend time that help them save time and get what they want,” says Downs Mulder. “And in this case, it’s getting information and having things to talk about.”
Tomorrow’s headlines
However, the main problem with recommendation algorithms that aggressively track user behavior and promote news with high engagement is that they often reinforce bias and can lead to the spread of misinformation. If you can carefully choose your news sources and the types of stories you want delivered to you, you run the risk of being locked in an echo chamber. Downs Mulder says Yahoo is trying to walk very carefully the ethical tightrope of giving users what they want to read without causing embarrassing side effects.
“I really like the way this app is put together because it balances the most important articles with ‘for you’ information in a way that keeps you aware of what I need and want to know,” Downs says Mulder. “This is what will keep the reader from falling too far down the rabbit hole.”
Another anti-bias feature of Artifact that came with the redesign is the ability to rewrite headlines on the fly. Users who see a clickbait headline can report it, and when enough people report it, the headline will be replaced in the app with a clearer, often more direct version. Novel headlines are created by a generative AI engine and polished by Yahoo’s human news curators.
To encourage people to click, the Yahoo News app also includes a gamification element that tracks how many articles you read and provides fun titles to gauge your level of effort. Read enough stories and you’ll get a badge. For example, reading one story earns you the title of Disciple, and reading up to 250 stories earns you a Sage, which Yahoo says marks you as “one of the top Yahoo News readers” in the app.
Artifacts in the Messages app could also pave the way for future features in Yahoo. Downs Mulder envisions a future in which people who read badges earn money in a more confined way. If someone is classified as a Sage, they may be treated as having greater authority or credibility within the broader Yahoo community.
Some previous Artifact features have not yet made their way to the novel Yahoo News. The pre-Yahoo version of Artifact included a feature that was used AI voices for reading articles aloudincluding AI-generated voices that sounded like a rapper Snoop Dogg AND non-rapper Including Gwyneth Paltrow. This option is not yet available in Yahoo News, although when asked about it, Downs Mulder says that more features will be coming to the Yahoo News app in the near future, and some of them will be in line with these concepts. “I just want you to stay tuned,” she says.