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There might finally be a reboot many people can get behind — but it’s not coming from Hollywood.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of Twitter’s original employees, is bringing back the beloved video-sharing app Vine.
Called Divine, the newly resurrected six-second video app is determined to recapture the authentic human creativity of the original platform, which spawned viral moments such as “What are those?,” “It is Wednesday, my dudes” and “Oh my God, they were roommates.”
To do so, Divine promises to share “real videos without AI.”
According to CNET, a press release about the new app said it “flags suspected GenAI content and prevents it from being posted.”
“Social media was social first. It’s about humans and our connection, not just pretty videos,” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, a.k.a. Rabble, in an interview with Business Insider.
He said Divine is his “attempt to fight back against the enshittification” of the internet and the mysterious algorithms of other social media apps.
The term “enshittification,” coined by Canadian writer, activist and CBC podcast host Cory Doctorow, refers to the deliberate decay of platforms in the name of profit, benefitting shareholders over users.
Fans of Vine may also be excited to hear that Divine — which is currently in beta testing — has already restored more than 100,000 archived videos posted to the original platform.
Divine has received financial support from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s non-profit And Other Stuff, an organization that aims to fund open-source projects that could change the world of social media.
Twitter acquired Vine in 2012, the year before the app debuted. In 2017, Twitter shut down the video-sharing platform, which Dorsey has since said was his biggest regret.
Notably, Elon Musk, who owns X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has also shown interest in reviving Vine recently. Earlier this year, he posted on X that his team had found the Vine video archive, but nothing has been announced or released since.
