← Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
Loading summary
Transcript109 lines
- [00:03]
A
This is a Global Player original podcast.
- [00:10]
B
Benedict Mary, just have a look at this message.
- [00:14]
A
Okay. This is a LinkedIn message. It says, your podcast inspired me to create Divine. And this. Who's this from?
- [00:26]
B
This is Rabble, creator of Divine.
- [00:28]
A
I have heard of Divine. It's like the new version of Vine. I'm looking at his profile. Yeah, it just says creator of. Let me. Sorry, can I read this again? It says, your podcast inspired me to create Divine. Email me. This is real.
- [00:39]
B
Yeah. No, I haven't made this up. And I have emailed him and I've said what? I'm sorry, are you serious? And he is serious.
- [00:47]
A
Our podcast.
- [00:48]
B
Our podcast.
- [00:49]
A
This explains why you've pulled me into a recording studio. Well, quite. This is nuts. Hello, dear listener, I'm Benedict Townsend. This is a special bonus episode of Vine's Six Seconds that changed the world that no one but Paul the psychic octopus saw coming. If you didn't listen to season one, here's a recap that frankly won't hold a candle to that mad magical journey that is listening from the beginning. But here goes. There was once an app called Vine. I loved it, unreasonably so. It was built by a small group of very clever people who pioneered rolling feeds, looping video, and so much of what now runs our online lives. It launched the careers of Logan and Jake. Paul, thank you for that. It gave us all the memes, potatoes flying around, rooms free Shavukadu, basically, for a brief moment, the Internet was funny on purpose or by accident. We never really decided. But there was one tiny hitch. Vine wasn't making any money, which in capitalism is what we call a problem. So when a group of the app's most popular creators went into full on rebellion, the app was already in crisis. And then vine, it was a beautiful, chaotic thing that couldn't survive the world it helped create. Or so we thought. Enter Divine.
- [02:09]
B
So, yeah, they're not just copying the old interface. Apparently they've somehow accessed the old vine archive itself. And they also have a potentially quite revolutionary stance on AI videos, which is basically to say that they're not welcome and they will be blocked.
- [02:22]
A
Yeah, I've heard a lot about this in the tech press. There's been tons of headlines about this. It's an app that's basically a recreation of vinegar. Right? So vine is back. Maybe we've heard that headline before, but this time it does seem to be sticking. And I think that's partly because Jack Dorsey, the former head of Twitter and Vine, I mean, the man who bought vine and then effectively killed it. He's funding this, and that is something. And we've got a founder. We love to have a founder on this podcast. What do we know about him, Mary?
- [02:50]
B
Yeah, so his full name is actually Evan Henshaw Plath, but he goes by Rabble. And he says the only reason for this actually is just that there are too many Evans in his industry. It turns out people called Evan really like doing tech startups. He's one of the originals of social media. He was the lead engineer and first employee of a company that you might not have heard of, called Odeo.
- [03:09]
A
I've not heard of that.
- [03:10]
B
Well, they turned into a different company, which you probably have heard of, called Twitter.
- [03:15]
A
I have heard of that, yes.
- [03:17]
B
So I messaged him on LinkedIn and honestly, I got in touch with him just because I felt like, well, clearly at the very least, this is kind of another chapter onto our story. Maybe there's something here worth at least a conversation. But actually, having had a bit of back and forth with him and his team, it's clear that there's a lot more to this than just resurrecting an old app. He sees Divine as a vehicle for remaking social media in the kind of way that goes back to its original purpose.
- [03:42]
A
I'm excited. Okay, bring on Rabble. On your website, it says you, quote, helped invent social media and Twitter.
- [03:53]
C
Yeah, it's a absolutely over the top claim. It's a little embarrassing that I said it, but I've had a career where I bounced back and forth between startups and activism. In the late 1990s, I was involved with trying to figure out how do we democratize the media and how do we use the the Internet for social change. We built a network of websites for activists around the world. You didn't have usernames and we didn't have smartphones. It prefigures what becomes social media. Through that work, I helped create a thing which was a text message based social network that we used in the 2004 protests related to Iraq war and stuff like that. So it's important to realize that social media wasn't invented by a person. It was invented by a community of people exploring how to use the Internet in its native form.
- [04:40]
A
Thank you so much for being here with us. When we heard about Divine, we were very excited and intrigued.
- [04:45]
C
Yeah, it's, it's really fun because I've listened to your podcast and it was inspiring for actually creating Divine.
- [04:51]
A
Well, thank you very much. How did Divine start?
- [04:54]
C
So Divine started as an experiment in many ways, it's an attempt to revive the soul of vine, but it is also me building an app that I think makes amends for some of the things that have happened in social media and tries to root it in a set of values and a set of technologies and a way of working that will make social media, all social media, healthier.
- [05:18]
A
Before it was consolidated into a handful of corporate platforms, the early web was open by design. Open in that anyone could create, share and build new services on the scaffolding that rabble and other tech visionaries had coded. You didn't need to create an account or download our app to continue browsing. You just needed a link and you could see the thing. Email still works this way. Gmail can talk to Outlook, Outlook can talk to Yahoo. Different systems, same message. Social media platforms do not. You can't access a Facebook message anywhere other than on Facebook. So social media changed from being an open house party to a private event manned by a bouncer with a guest list.
- [05:58]
C
The very earliest primordial forms of social media, so blogging and Internet forums, they were very much rooted in an open source, free software hacker ethic of an open Internet and open web. And the first generation of social media companies, as it were, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, they operated very much as part of an open Internet. They controlled the platform, but they didn't entirely control the experience. In the era of 2010 to 2012, these companies started realizing that in order to make money, because, you know, they were all losing money at this point, they needed to run ads. Ads drove an incentive model. And that incentive model behind the advertising model meant that the platforms stopped being open and they closed things down. They said, don't use your third party Twitter accounts, don't spend all your time in farmville, use the official Facebook thing, use the official Twitter app. And so that's sort of the moment right before vine comes out where a new model for how these things work that's much more app centric, much more like the company defines the experience that shutting down of the open social media ecosystem. So I think that transition is where we lose a lot of rights.
- [07:15]
A
Remember when Facebook switched from the wall to the news feed? It was a time of endless updates. And while we were all preoccupied with the annoying surface alterations, something much bigger was going on beneath the surface. The open web was closing. Third party apps like farmville were pushed off platforms. Now, you may not miss farmville. I do, because who's going to feed my chickens? But when control centralizes, the consequences get bigger and rabble had a front row seat.
- [07:43]
C
I sat down with Jack Dorsey in 2017, and we were drinking kombucha and talking about what he was doing, because at the time he had come back as CEO of Twitter and he said, should I ban Trump? President Trump's Twitter account was taken down for near tonight. A deafening silence from the President's Twitter account.
- [08:01]
A
It's a sad day when big tech has more power than big government, that they can censor the President of the United States.
- [08:09]
C
After the ban, the President tried to tweet from other campaign and staff accounts, triggering a game of whack a mole with Twitter quickly taking down his post, which means last night the President had.
- [08:19]
A
The most boring poops of his life.
- [08:22]
C
This is a question that a lot of people are asking. And it didn't get banned until after January 6th in 2000. So three years later, and everybody was upset at him for either making the decision to eventually ban Trump or not ban Trump or this person or that person, everything else. And we lived in a world where we were all dependent on this one guy to decide who had access to this major platform. And the Internet shouldn't be like that. You know, whether or not it's Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel as Top Chat or Jack Dorsey or Adam Astari who runs Instagram, none of these people should be the people in charge. Not because they're not good people. They're actually, you know, trying really hard, but they are an impossible situation. And so the Internet was designed by a bunch of engineers, and they have a mantra which is we reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code. And so that's what gave us the Internet, that sort of little phrase. And what we're trying to do is make social media live up to the ideals of the Internet.
- [09:27]
A
Which brings us to divine. Decades after they first worked together on Twitter rabble, a man on a mission to bring back social media's punk spirit, and Jack Dorsey, a guy with enough money to make it happen, joined forces again.
- [09:40]
C
Yeah, so Jack Dorsey obviously did very well as CEO of Twitter. And so he set up a personal foundation, as billionaires do. And one of the things that he's been funding is work on open source technology to make the Internet a better place. Jack Dorsey and I sit down and we're like, what are we doing in the world today? What do we need? And we got together with a whole bunch of other hackers and designers and folks, and we've just been building new things. And so we had all These conversations about the history of social media. What did we lose? Was there anything that we could think of in the past that we might be able to do in the future?
- [10:17]
A
Something from the past, you say? A beloved, lost relic of rose tinted Internet times gone by.
- [10:22]
C
And I listened to the vine six Seconds to Change the World podcast and Jack said that his biggest regret as CEO of Twitter was the shutdown of Vine. And that's where I was like, well, how hard could it be to build a Vine like app?
- [10:36]
A
Part of Vine's appeal for Rabble was that at its core, vine was using technology to enhance an age old human behavior.
- [10:45]
C
What vine did was give people the ability to do that sketch, do that humor thing, do that joke. But instead of just the people around the campfire or the people in your salon, or the people you meet, you know, at the line of the bus stop, you're making the social boundaries much more permeable. So now millions of people or hundreds of millions of people can see it. The same human activity is going on, but now we have a different technological platform.
- [11:11]
A
While we're on the subject of beloved memories of a bygone era, don't you miss the time when you could trust the videos that you saw online were of real things recorded by real people? Well, Rabble saw an opportunity with Divine to bring that back too.
- [11:24]
C
In theory, it's fine to enjoy watching AI generated content. The deception is not fine. And the lack of humanity, humanity and a lot of this AI generated content is profound. It's hollow, it lacks humanity. And so I don't think we should ban AI content everywhere from the Internet. But I want to be able to have a space where it's not being shoved down my throat and you can.
- [11:49]
A
Tell at the point of upload. Have I understood that correctly?
- [11:52]
C
Yes. So I'm friends with a bunch of technologists that do human rights work, and they have created this technology so that if you have your phone and you're recording police beating people up or someone getting shot or some other kind of, you know, bribery or something like that, there's technology in the phone that let you verify that. This was not edited, this was not modified. This was all originally shot on a camera with a certain kind of phone. And it's not 100% perfect, but it gives you a lot of evidence. And this evidence was created for using in the legal system. It's called Proof Mode. And I've sort of known about it for a long time. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if we could use your human Rights tech and put it in a social video app. But we also use, ironically enough, a bunch of AI to see whether or not it's AI, and we use user reporting to see it. And so I'm sure that there will be bits of AI generated content that fool us, but our commitment is to get the vast majority of it.
- [12:56]
A
So Rabble had his vision. Revive the soul of vine, but give it a new body. Build it on open Internet principles, sweep out the non human slop. For a few months he worked on it quietly, a one man passion project.
- [13:09]
C
I sat down just on my own and in a few days I had something working and I was like, oh look, building vine is about as hard as building Twitter. I have a weekly call with Jack and some of the other people and I would give a lot of updates and a little demo.
- [13:19]
A
How did you come up with the name?
- [13:21]
C
So I tried a bunch of different names, like Open vine, because it's like vine but open. And then we tried names that weren't directly related to Vine. Then we were like, what if it was de vine, like you know, from vine, but then people aren't going to know how to spell it. And then we're like, well, Divine has its own meaning. And so I was like, oh, this, this kind of works. And people know the heritage, but they can also see that it's a different app. Then once we launched it, we started getting people saying do it for Divine. And like, it almost immediately got incorporated with the same creative energy.
- [13:55]
B
Do it.
- [13:56]
A
I'm going to do it.
- [13:57]
C
Do put a bus, I'm going to do it.
- [14:01]
A
Rabble was having fun and eventually got to a place where he felt ready to announce the project to the world. Okay, let's talk about the beta. Like you said, you had hundreds, 150,000 people tried to sign up at the first day or whatever.
- [14:14]
C
First day.
- [14:15]
A
So there's a lot of interest at the very least.
- [14:17]
C
I had not anticipated so many people using it. I had not anticipated so much demand or so much attention or so much excitement. And what you need to do in order to handle 150,000 people is really different than what you need to do to be able to handle a thousand people. And I expected a thousand people. My, my promotion plan was I asked Jack to tweet about it and he hasn't tweeted about it because we got so much interest from all over the world. And the articles picked up and so what I realized was talking to some of the Viners who showed up. Some of these old Viner stars That they really care about it. They believe in the idea of a space where we have agency around not having AI slop, you know, where we get this medium. What they all said was, take your time and make sure it works. And so I am working as fast as possible because building the capacity to handle this, we're going to have to sort of walk before we can run.
- [15:19]
A
So in terms of like interface, when a person is logging into Divine, is it the same kind of thing as it stripped down, square screen, touch the screen to record? Have you kept that kind of stuff? The same?
- [15:30]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I have spent a lot of time playing with the original vine, apparently, because you can sort of download it. There's a community of hackers that have the original one and you can download it on really old phones or run it on simulators. And so I spent a bunch of time playing with that. I spent a bunch of time looking at the original experience. To me, the special ingredients are the constraints. You know, vine got the camera, so. Right. They got the follow experience, so. Right. They got the social dynamics, so. Right. And it's not exactly the same. Conventions have changed in the last decade. The goal is to authentically reproduce what vine had, but update it for what we have learned in the last decade.
- [16:10]
A
Right.
- [16:11]
B
So I'm going to interrupt here because quite excitingly, we don't have to just hear about the beta, we have access to it.
- [16:17]
A
Oh, wow.
- [16:18]
B
Very generously. Rabble has arranged it. I do now have a fully operational Divine, well, Beta Divine working on my phone.
- [16:25]
A
Wow. Okay, so immediately it looks exactly like vine from what I can remember. I mean, in terms of layout, in terms of the green. So you can be hands free with the record button.
- [16:35]
B
Yeah.
- [16:35]
A
And then let's hop on the Explore page. So you've got some new videos. I mean, mostly just random stuff from the people who are beta testing it. For those of you who don't know what a beta is, it's basically a test version of an app where they're still working out the bugs. So you use it knowing that you're helping to fix it. And then let's hop to the popular videos. Okay, so you've got some classic stuff from the archives here. We've got some lele pons. This video here has 84 million loops. So I assume that is a classic video. It is, actually. They've put a little nice watermark in the top right corner that says V original. So I guess that's how they're handling the archive stuff. Oh, there's the first appearance of Jake, Paul and, oh, also some videos that have clearly slipped through the net. I think moderation's gonna get to that one first. That's just the nature of a beta, but also mainly lots of cats, which I'm happy about.
- [17:27]
C
Vine predates a world in which everything is gamed for the algorithm. Like, the algorithms can be really effective, but in vine you had to build up an audience by working with people, by getting people's attention, not by learning how to play some black box algorithm. And so I think it feels to people like a more innocent era, an era where social media wasn't so complicated. You know, there were lots of really negative things that happened on Vine. It's not this utopia. But looking back, we have the nostalgia of the past and it feels like.
- [18:01]
A
That there's good reason to fear and resent the all powerful algorithm and its impact on our lives and society as a whole. But the reality is an app with no algorithm at all quickly starts to look unappealing.
- [18:14]
C
Like if you just look at Random Vines, you're going to see a lot of K pop Thirst Trap videos. So many Thirst Trap videos are in that archive. And we don't think of vine as this massive K pop Thirst Trap video service. So we now expect some control. What we're doing with Divine is we're saying you have choice. So you can choose amongst various different algorithms, you can choose for human curators, and we're going to open it up so that people outside of our organization can provide their own. So you could say, you know, I want a different person's set of algorithms, or this other service or their moderation decision, decision. You can choose the Divine ones, the divine algorithms we provide, and the divine moderation tagging. But you would also say, you know what, I don't want to do this. The problem isn't the algorithms. The problem is who has a say over them, who has agency over them. Why are we all getting this monoculture of algorithms and what is it optimized for? You can optimize an algorithm for happiness or optimize an algorithm to show you less. If there's a flame war in the comments, you can optimize an algorithm to show you just cats. And so in that world, algorithms aren't bad, it's the power dynamic behind them.
- [19:31]
A
My algorithm would be optimized for. Well, actually also for cats. He kind of nailed it with cats. It would also be cats. But even cats need rules. You can customize a feed, but you cannot break the law.
- [19:43]
C
That's where moderation comes in moderation is an exceedingly hard problem. There's this impossibility theorem, it's called Masnik's Impossibility Theorem of Internet moderation, which is that moderation, well, on the Internet is impossible at scale. It's easy to do it when you've got a few think about, and you can spend five minutes thinking about this issue. And you can be like, okay, well, you know, who is this person? And what's the context and the history of it? And then it gets hard when you're trying to do a few thousand a day, and then it gets really, really hard when you're trying to do a few million a day. And people are publishing in all these different languages and all these different communities. And so the goal is to solve that problem by making the moderation itself contextual. And so there are different people and communities and servers you can go to within Divine that will give you different moderation decisions. Now, we have some things that we absolutely will not put on the Divine service. We actually have a lot we won't put on the Divine service. And we have content which is straight up illegal in different jurisdictions. And so we do that kind of filtering, but we also do a set of filtering, which is what is a healthy space. What is the kind of space we want to cultivate and Divine. And if you don't like that, if you want a more edgy thing, or you want moderation in your own language or your own community instead of, you know, California Western norms, then you can set up your own servers, you can set up your own moderation services and your own algorithms, and you're in the larger video ecosystem of Divine, but you're off our servers.
- [21:19]
A
One of the most exciting things in the Divine announcement was, of course, the resurrection of the vine archive.
- [21:25]
C
Damn, Daniel, back at it again with the white. What the hell are you doing? I am doing my eyebrows. That's a big ass mirror. I have big ass eyebrows. Yeah, that was legitness.
- [21:38]
A
Yeah, it was.
- [21:39]
C
I spilled lipstick in your Valentino bag. Oh, you spilled lipstick and my Valentino white.
- [21:46]
A
We still had some of the most iconic vines on YouTube, but resurrecting a trove of bygone vines is not so straightforward.
- [21:53]
C
Then I found a group of people who were volunteers who made an archive of vine when it was starting to get shut down called Archive Team.
- [22:02]
A
If you're familiar with the Wayback Machine, it's those guys. If you're not, don't worry about it. You can basically just picture them as the Internet's underpaid librarians and these folks.
- [22:11]
C
Had copied and preserved not just the videos, the comments and the usernames and how many loops they had and how many revinds all of this other data. So the videos have been on the Internet the whole time. They've just been stuck in this inaccessible format. What I did was, you know, re put together the puzzle.
- [22:33]
A
Wow, it's like true Internet archaeology in a way.
- [22:36]
C
Absolutely. Yeah. We also are going to let people reclaim their accounts. Now we don't have their passwords, but we are going to let people like log back in and post new videos in the same account that they had before. Of course, we don't own the copyright to this. Some people are like, you know, I was a kid when I made these vines, please take them down. Like, absolutely, country boy, I love you.
- [23:04]
A
So part of Rabble's project is to literally recreate what vine offered. But this is all in aid of his wider mission, which goes much further than that.
- [23:13]
C
I published this sort of manifesto before I started working on Divine called the Social Media Bill of Rights. And those are like the rights to privacy and security, you know, the rights to own and control your own identity and your followers, the rights to choose and understand the algorithms that you're using, the rights to community self governance. So we don't have one sort of opaque governance, standards setting rules behind everything and the right to portability and exit.
- [23:37]
A
These rights might sound pretty basic, but this is what Rabble says we lost when the open Internet became a walled garden, controlled and ad friendly.
- [23:46]
C
And so what we're doing today with Divine is we're taking the essence of vine, this particular kind of art and humor, and we're changing the power dynamic. It tries to solve the fundamental problems that existed between the Viners and the vine company.
- [24:06]
A
Next, I have to ask Grabell a very awkward question. That AI slop and the Elon Musk of it all right after the break. Welcome back to Vine. Six seconds that changed the world. The bonus episode. This is a. It's sad I have to ask this question, but unfortunately it is a question that is very reasonable to ask these days, which is, are all these videos just going to be used to train some AI model?
- [24:42]
C
No, that is one of the sort of conspiracy theories and rumors that are out there is that we're running Divine filtering out all the AI stuff so that we can have a pure data set to train large language models. And that is not the business model. This is an open source project that, you know, we invite people to participate in. You can see exactly how everything we're doing works. It's entirely out there in the open and that's not the business model we're in. The goal is not some nefarious other thing of, you know, secretly selling stuff to AI companies.
- [25:19]
A
Good, it's very nice to hear anyone say that these days.
- [25:23]
B
And it's a very, very like reasonable fear at the moment just because of how a lot of content online is, is now being used that way. What prevents you from down the line selling to someone else who then goes, wow, we've got a great database, we can now use this to train an AI model Or is there nothing that can stop that?
- [25:42]
C
So we put it in our terms of service that we won't do it. So we make that commitment in the legal agreement with users who are publishing in the terms of service. Obviously very wealthy companies are able to use and twist the law around for their own sake. They're not necessarily going to go to us and ask for it. They might just take it. And there's, you know, we can do everything we can to try and prevent that and try and protect users, protect their privacy and protect their sovereignty over their data, but we can't prevent what other companies might do.
- [26:15]
A
What started as a one man mission to give users, not platforms, control has become something of a rallying cry. Drawing on his decades in tech rabble's gathered a talented gang of techies who are more than happy to lend their time to turning his vision into reality.
- [26:30]
C
Up until the week I released Divine or announced it, it was a one person project and then it blew up and I was like, oh damn, like this isn't a thing that can be a one person project like Twitter had years before it got hundreds of thousands of users. We had 150,000 people try and sign up the first day. I can't maintain the servers and answer the support requests and then look at like the content reports and then like talk to the press and then like review the legal contracts and then like fix the bugs in the like just it's too much for one person. And so I have drawn on my network and I have been in the world of, of building social media apps for a very long time and building startups for a very long time. And so I have pulled in so many friends and so many people from the open source community and all of these people who are coming together to contribute to this open source project. And some of those people we were able to pay and some of those people were purely volunteer. I've used every contact I'VE had to try and make something that honors the excitement that everyone has.
- [27:37]
A
I love the idea of people kind of doing it voluntarily. It speaks to how much people love Vine. This is all lovely, of course, but there's a big elephant in the room. A big South African multi billionaire elephant, to be exact. The number one thing everyone asks me when I talk about vine coming back is people say, doesn't Elon Musk own Vine? How does that work? And could you please explain?
- [28:04]
C
Elon Musk owns Vine Co. He owns the vine trademark, although there's some debate about whether or not it's still valid because it's been gone for a while and you have to actually actively use it for a trademark to stay valid. He doesn't own the videos and the content themselves. Those are all held by the users themselves. We have tried to be clear that we have the vine content, but we are not Vine. We are not attempting to pretend that this is the vine app or the original. It's an homage.
- [28:36]
A
Sure.
- [28:37]
C
And there is a reality in, in Silicon Valley which is like, ask forgiveness, not permission. Like, this was not a major investment. This was a one person project for four months saying, wouldn't this be neat? And I put it out there and I knew we could run into problems and it would have just been, you know, something that came and went, so who knows what'll happen in the future. But it's something I wanted to see in the world. So I built it.
- [29:08]
A
Build the platform and they will come or produce a podcast and someone will convince one of the world's wealthiest billionaires to revive your favorite social media app.
- [29:17]
C
I'm incredibly appreciative of you and your podcast and the way in which you so elegantly told the story of vine and told it from different people's perspectives and how to humanity into it. I think that so much of the time we see social media from the perspective of the companies that have marketing teams and have PR teams and they're presenting this sanitized picture of all these things and the six seconds that changed the world. Podcast tells the story in its depth, in its complexity, in its contradictions. And I think that vine is something that is really culturally important. It is really meaningful to people. And I just feel incredibly lucky to be a part of a community of people being able to reclaim that and a community of people being able to build it.
- [30:15]
A
That's very kind, thank you very much. It was a real labor of love for us. So it's nice that it connected. And that was rabble.
- [30:25]
B
That's Rabble. What a lovely man.
- [30:27]
A
Lovely guy.
- [30:28]
B
Really great taste in podcasts.
- [30:30]
A
Look, now, I know we're English and we don't like bragging and we're all self deprecating, but I do think, you know, a little pat on the back is needed. We did bring back vine and I think that is just. It's just such a strange full circle we didn't anticipate and I think it's worth acknowledging.
- [30:45]
B
Let's be serious for a second though. What do you actually think?
- [30:48]
A
Having spoken to Rabble, I mean, it's all very interesting. We'll have to see how it shakes out. I think the AI stance alone, even if Divine folded tomorrow, the fact that they've drawn that line in the sand could be a legacy in its own way. Not least because, you know, Elon Musk, he was talking about bringing back vine and making it all AI. So there's certainly a distinction made there. I think the questions I hear most about this is, is this going to make any money? Because, you know, as much as we vilify these big companies and their greed and their ads and all this, like, you do have to make some money, you've got to keep the lights on, you've got to pay employees, you got to pay for servers. Do they have any kind of business plan?
- [31:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is something I actually push them on a little more after the interview. They sort of say they're very, very early in this process. They're still trying to develop the product, still sort of testing out what their user base likes. And so the answer is basically, no, not yet. And the thing is that if they want to keep true to Rabble's vision, they're not going to be able to lean on the usual money making methods that most apps would use. So, yeah, they have ideas, they have the beginnings of plans. But it's going to be interesting to see as time goes on whether this becomes something that is properly sustainable.
- [31:56]
A
Original vine, part of the reason it went down was that it never made any money.
- [31:59]
B
If it fails for that reason, I think it'll be such a shame. If it succeeds, I think it will be for a really exciting reason, which is that actually people really care about the basis of the online world that they're living in. And in the same way that we saw people migrating from Twitter, from X rather to Blue sky, because they said no, we actually do want a different kind of moderation. We want more control. All of this in a similar way, we might see the crowds moving to.
- [32:25]
A
Divine, you know, We've always said that vine couldn't exist now because we live in a post vine world. So his solution to that is to go, okay, when was the last time everyone was broadly happy with social media? The time of Vine. We'll basically go back to that time and we'll reset, we'll start again. It's a bit like, I don't know if you've seen the documentary Endgame, where they have to go back in time and change things. He's basically doing that. He's going back to vine, changing what vine is, and then hoping that we can sort of start afresh from there as if we're on a new timeline.
- [32:56]
B
Yeah, it's fine, but with different foundations.
- [32:58]
A
And we'll have to see how that goes. It worked for the Avengers, but you know what the main thing is we brought back vine and that should be celebrated. Let's pop the champagne. Mary, where's the champagne?
- [33:10]
B
We still don't have budget for champagne.
- [33:11]
A
Benedict, we brought back Vine. We don't have a champagne budget.
- [33:15]
B
Maybe season two.
- [33:16]
A
What kind of podcast doesn't have a champagne budget? Vine's Six Seconds that Changed the World is a Global original. Original podcast. You can listen on Global Player, download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co creator, Mary Goodheart and Kevia Cardoso. Alexandra, Juno and Sophie Snelling are executive producers. Al Riddell is head of podcasts and Vicky Etchels is director of podcasts at Global. And of course, huge thanks to Rabble and Alice Chan from Divine. This has been a Global Player original production.