Jack Dorsey is bringing the nostalgia back, just a few seconds at a time.
Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2007 and served as its inaugural CEO for a year until returning to the position for a six-year stint in its seemingly darkest years between 2015 and 2021.
Now, through his nonprofit called and Other Stuff, Dorsey is bringing one of the internet’s most beloved applications back from the dead.
‘Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things …’
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, Dorsey’s pick to spearhead the revival. The New Zealander comes from Dorsey’s nonprofit team, where he is known as Rabble, and has outlined aspirations to bring the internet vibe back to its Web 2.0 time period — roughly 2004-2010 or thereabouts.
Dorsey and Henshaw-Plath are rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that predominantly served viewers short, user-generated comedy clips. The format is a clear inspiration for modern apps like TikTok and formats like YouTube’s Shorts and Instagram’s Reels.
Dorsey and company are focused on keeping the nostalgic feel, however, and unlike the other apps, will keep a six-second time limit while also taking a stance on content. What that means, according to Yahoo, is that the platform will reject AI-generated videos using special filters meant to prevent them from being posted.
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The new app, called diVine, will revive 10,000 archived Vine posts, after the new team was able to extract a “good percentage” of some of the most popular videos.
Former Vine users are able to claim their old videos, so long as they can prove access to previously connected social media accounts that were on their former Vine profiles. Alternatively, the users can request that their old videos be taken down.
“The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world,” Dorsey said, per Yahoo.
This will be done by “using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner,” he added.
Henshaw-Plath commented on returning to simpler internet times — as silly as it sounds — when a person’s content feed only consisted of accounts he follows, with real, user-generated content.
“Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?” he asked.
RELATED: Twitter announces the demise of video-sharing app Vine, internet weeps (2016)
According to Tech Crunch, Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for $30 million before eventually shutting down in 2016.
The app sparked careers for personalities like Logan Paul, Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, and John Richard Whitfield, aka DC Young Fly. Bachelor and Whitfield captured the genre that was most popular on the platform: eccentric young performers who published unique comedy.
DiVine is currently in a beta stage and is available only to existing users of the messenger app Nostr.
X owner Elon Musk announced in August that he was trying acquire access to Vine’s archive so that users could post the videos on his platform.
“We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want,” Musk wrote.
However, it seems the billionaire may have been beaten to the punch by longtime rival Dorsey.
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Return, Twitter, X, Vine, Social media, Comedy, App, Divine, Dorsey, Tech