The short video app Vine is being rebooted under the name diVine, with a beta for the new app opening this November. It will re-open access to 100,000 old Vine videos and allow users to create and post videos in six-second loops.
A former employee of Twitter, now X, is relaunching the app with financial backing from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. In 2006, Dorsey launched Twitter alongside Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Dorsey terminated Vine, which was bought by Twitter in 2012, in 2016 “due to declining user growth and the ongoing financial strain,” EM360Tech reports.
Dmitri Dahal, a third-semester physiology and neurobiology major said, “for me personally, I feel like most of the people that were famous back then, I still watch their content.”
Some of the more popular ex-Viners, including David Dobrik and Logan Paul, moved their content to YouTube or Instagram, taking much of their fanbase with them.
According to NBCNews, “Nicholas Fraser was catapulted into the national spotlight in August 2015 after releasing his ‘Why You Always Lying?’ Vine.” Additionally, “[t]he 27-year-old content creator has since gone on to produce music and a YouTube cooking show — and even sold his classic Vine (and meme) as an NFT.”
According to TechCrunch, diVine will have a different approach to AI content on the platform. Unlike other social media platforms where content is labeled as AI, diVine will flag content that is supposedly AI and prevent the post altogether.
“Vine back in the day didn’t use AI,” Dahal said. “Moments like ‘Wow, look at all those chickens’ and ‘Road work ahead, I sure hope there is’ didn’t have AI to guide them.”
A press release statement to CNET says diVine has been “designed to bring back the days of ‘real content made by real people.’”
Evan Henshaw-Plath, who was Dorsey’s boss at a small tech platform called Odeo when they first started working, said in the press release that he “[wants] to show people that we don’t need to settle for this dystopia.”
“With apps like Divine, we can see the alternative,” Henshaw-Plath said.
Henshaw-Plath also said in an interview with Business Insider “social media was social first. It’s about humans and our connection, not just pretty videos.”
Martin Jeffrey, a digital strategist specializing in AI and platform architecture, told NewsWeek that YouTube alone contributes citations to AI models at a rate more than 200 times that of most social networks, illustrating the extent to which these systems rely on user-generated video content.
Dahal thinks that diVine won’t be as “successful” as TikTok or Instagram Reels due to diVine following Vine’s footsteps in having a six second time limit on posts, unlike the former apps which do not have that six second limit.
The time limit puts restrictions on advertisements leading to a lack of profit, the Heritage Christian School reports.