Jack Dorsey Funds diVine, a Vine Reboot That Includes Vine's Video Archive (techcrunch.com) 20
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine's shutdown. The app won't just exist as a walk down memory lane; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike on traditional social media, where AI content is often haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted. According to TechCrunch, a volunteer preservation group called the Archive Team saved Vine's content when it shut down in 2016. The only problem was that everything was stored in massive 40-50 GB binary blob files that were basically unusable for casual viewing.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "I wasn't able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network," he said.
Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.
You can check out the app for yourself at diVine.video. It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "I wasn't able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network," he said.
Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.
You can check out the app for yourself at diVine.video. It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.
Off to a good start. (Score:3)
"Video unable to load"
Once upon a time I'd suspect it had been "slashdotted" , but I doubt Slashdot generates the sort of firehose of traffic it once did. Which means this things just fallen on its arse in normal traffic. Not a good way to launch a ..... startup... or whatever this is supposed to be?
The vine people must be pretty bitter they gave up the ghost and then a year or three later tiktok did more or less the exact same thing and turned into one of the biggest gen z sites on the planet.
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Timing is everything.
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I know 1 or 2 people who used Vine when it was out then wouldn't stop talking about it for years after it shut down. There was a user base at one time. I doubt that will translate to today, though.
We're going to trust Dorsey again? (Score:2)
No thanks.
Copyright (Score:2)
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Copyright != License.
Unless the ToS say you assigned the copyright to Vine rather than an unlimited license, you retain it.
Unpopular opinion (Score:2)
Wrote and tweaked a video generation prompt multiple times until it produced something resembling a usable output = "Low effort AI slop."
Film yourself acting like you're high on speed with your phone's selfie camera while ranting about someone putting lobster tails on an EBT card at Walmart = "Such amazing content creator skillz!"
I suppose I just have a different definition of what constitutes "low effort".
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Two page Linkedin post about how great they are, that took the writer 3 hours ... still slop.
Re: Unpopular opinion (Score:2)
Wheee
Six-second videos what? (Score:2)
I have never heard of Vine, but it sounds like Tiktok in much much worse. And since it comes from Dorsey, it's safe to assume it's gonna be shit.
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I have never heard of Vine, but it sounds like Tiktok in much much worse. And since it comes from Dorsey, it's safe to assume it's gonna be shit.
You might be surprised what can be done with only 6 seconds of video. It's a challenge, like writing haiku. Some of them were pretty damned funny, and often because they were cut short in the middle of some action or reaction, leaving the rest to your imagination.
Sounds like an interesting project (Score:2)
Cynicism and irony aside, how can we not want to support any initiative giving more permanence to cultural ephemera? I'm sure some interesting and very unique content can be snipped from some of these clips, and it can only lead to further remixing and mashing up into platforms that are currently trendy like TikTok.
"massive 40-50 GB" (Score:1)
Surely they mean some other measuring unit, not GB? Even 50 TB wouldn't be "massive".
vine is fine (Score:2)
How was Vine any different than TikTok?
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