Picture this: it’s 2015.
The bell rings, school’s out, and before you know it, you’re deep into your third Vine compilation of the day, quoting videos the next day like it’s a shared language. For Millennials and early Gen Z, Vine was a staple of internet culture.
After its abrupt shutdown in 2017, it slowly died out, collecting dust and becoming a piece of YouTube memorabilia. However, talks about Vine’s comeback have gradually made its way back onto the Internet today. If the rumors are true, we might be entering a new era- and your old favorite Vines may finally have their sequel.
Launching in Jan. 2013, Vine quickly became the most downloaded video-sharing app, amassing over 200 million users during its height in 2013-2014. Its homemade, quirky six-second clips combined with how easy the platform was to use turned it into a cultural fast lane where anyone could go viral overnight.
It’s the place where many of today’s biggest internet personalities first found their audience, including Logan Paul, Shawn Mendes, Quenlin Blackwell, King Bach, Liza Koshy, and countless others. Unfortunately, everything went dark in 2016 when Vine’s parent app, Twitter (formerly known as X) shut the app down amid competition with Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram.
Fast forward to 2025, and the digital landscape looks very different. TikTok now dominates the internet by defining youth culture and commanding the attention of millions. Now, creators have the choice to choose between both short-form and long-form content, where standard videos can range from 15 seconds to 10 minutes long.
And with the rise of AI, reactions across the internet have been mixed, sparking curiosity, confusion, amusement, and even pushback as people grapple with what this new era of content creation means. The continued elevation of artificial intelligence even inspired the creation of art, music, actors/actresses, and singers using these tools.
Earlier this month on CBS Morning, Gayle King had the chance to even speak with a user of this technology who birthed AI Xania Monet.
And now, it seems Vine’s entered its comeback era. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and early employee Evan Henshaw-Plath have developed a reboot app ‘diVine’, which will bring back 10,000 archived videos from the old platform. The new app also seeks to stand strongly against any AI-generated content through special filters and regulations in efforts to preserve authenticity.
“With AI-produced content fast becoming indistinguishable from regular content, AI slop has been flooding centralized mainstream social media platforms with requirements to tag AI content being largely ignored or enforced,” the press release reads. “diVine, which flags suspected Gen AI content and prevents it from being posted, has been designed to bring back the days of ‘real content’ made by real people.”
As excitement around diVine and its mission grows, so does speculation. According to Newsweek, Dorsey states, “It’s not going to take down X or TikTok. It’s in beta now with roughly 150,000 archived videos created by 60,000 creators. This is a community-building project for a niche community.”
Whether diVine becomes a major competitor or remains a nostalgic niche, its return signals something bigger: a return to the Vine days, an era when the internet felt experimental, imperfect, and genuinely fun.
And in a digital world that changes faster every year, maybe that alone is enough to spark the comeback we didn’t know we needed.