As millennials await the recently threatened relaunch of Myspace, tomorrow sees the launch of a new social media service that looks (and sounds) like another defunct social platform. Divine is a video-sharing app where users can post six-second loops, essentially making it a revamp of Vine, which shuttered in 2017.
Though it has no affiliation to the Twitter-owned app, Divine claims to be “inspired by Vine” and hosts more than 2.5 million “Vine classics” on the platform. Following almost nine months in development, the app launches to the public on Thursday 20th August, no longer requiring invite codes to join the platform.
(Six) second chances
Divine was created by Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble, one of the chief architects of Twitter (another blast from the past), and is funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Yet the independent company’s positioning emphasises its distinction from X by banning AI-generated content, and suggests a desire to loop back to a pre-Musk era of social media.
“Created by Rabble, a member of Twitter’s founding team, Divine aims to reinvent a social media landscape shaped by black-box algorithms, remove the pressure on creators to optimise for engagement, and eliminate the growing volume of AI-generated slop,” the company said in a press release. “Its approach is deliberately different: give people the freedom to create for each other, not for an algorithm.”
And where Vine struggled to monetise its micro-video content, ultimately losing creators to competitors such as YouTube and Instagram, Divine aims to build commercial opportunities into the platform from the outset. The company has announced Taco Bell as its first brand partner, giving Taco Bell customers early access to sign up to the service. Divine says this model of brand collaboration allows brands to contribute to the community, “rather than interrupting them with conventional advertising.”
Out of the loop
By bypassing algorithmically driven monetisation, the company is seeking to remove the financial incentives to produce content designed to be surfaced by the algorithm. In theory this allows for more creativity on the platform, and avoids the race to put out slop or toxic content.
Built on the open Nostr protocol, Divine is “designed not to be a walled garden”, claiming to provide transparency by removing the black box elements of social media algorithms. The business says these open-source foundations also give creators ownership of their content, instead of making them dependent on a single platform.
“By stripping away the pressure to create content that gets picked up by an ad algorithm, we’ve uncovered what it is that people actually want to create,” said Rabble. “That’s the magic of Divine. People are making loops fueled by an original idea and their desire to share with others, not because a recommendation engine is making them guess what will perform. We are starting a movement to make social media feel creative, joyful and human again.”
While this admirable approach has plenty of appeal amid a backlash against AI and social media toxicity, it will be challenging for Divine to cut through in a short-form video environment now dominated by TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, whose monetisation models have proven lucrative for its most popular creators – many of whom left Vine for bigger (and longer) opportunities.
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