Remember Vine? Yeah, I’m kind of fuzzy on it, myself, and I lived through its entire life cycle. It kicked the bucket back in January 2017, so nine years in the social media landscape is equivalent to two prehistoric epics.
Lots of you who are reading will have come of age after Vine’s heyday of 2012 to 2014. Vine was an early short-video social media platform wherein every video was limited to a maximum of six seconds.
Now, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and founder of Bluesky, has brought it back, kind of, under the name diVine. And the big news isn’t the name. It’s that you won’t be able—in theory, at least—to post anything AI-generated.
what it’ll look like
YouTube, having launched to the public in December 2005, had the stranglehold on longer videos. Even just a couple of years later, it was hard to imagine a time before YouTube. When things had gone viral, it was because a bunch of people had consciously decided to share it with people they knew, and so on, not because an algorithm had decided to show things to strangers.
Vine was an opportunity to carve out a space in shorter, more impulsive videos. TikTok is the king of this space, with Instagram’s Reels also jockeying for market space. DiVine will bring back the six-second limit for videos, but can it elbow its way back into a market space it abandoned almost a decade ago?
Think of it like the anti-Sora. Whereas OpenAI’s Sora social media app predictably is all about sharing AI-generated videos, diVine will expressly block them from being uploaded.
And if you miss the old Vine videos that disappeared after it shut down on January 17, 2017, good news: More than 100,000 archived Vine videos will be made available to watch on diVine. They’ll be restored through a backup made before Vine’s deletion.
The post Remember Vine, the Short Video App? It’s Back, in a Way. appeared first on VICE.
