#oneaday Day 525: Less than diVine

Apparently the erstwhile Twitter and Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey has funded a relaunch of the social video service Vine in the form of "diVine", a new app/service that not only does what Vine did, but also has an archive of "more than 100,000" Vine videos from before the service shut down.

Vine, for the unfamiliar, was a service where you could post six-second looping videos. And that was pretty much it.

Some people I've seen are really excited about this and I do not understand it. To my eye, Vine's six-second videos were not only the height of pointlessness, they were the beginning of one of my least favourite evolutions of the Web: the obsession with "short-form content" that has led us to today's TikTok-obsessed society, and the fact that some people would inexplicably rather get their news in vertical video form from someone holding a camera too close to their face, yelling and presenting subtitles for what they're saying one word at a time in an obnoxiously loud font.

To some folks, Vine was the height of comedy, and I still don't get it. I've seen supposedly popular Vine skits and found them painfully unfunny. To others, it was a place to enjoy music loops, but I'd rather listen to full tracks rather than six-second loops. To others still, I'm sure it was a place to perv on girls dancing (which is, to this day, one of the first things many people suggest to me when I indicate my distaste for TikTok), but if I want to get my rocks off to sexy girls, the Internet has been built on that for decades.

When Vine was originally a thing, I downloaded it to see what all the supposed fuss was about, but deleted it in less than an hour after completely failing to understand the appeal. I had absolutely no desire to make six-second videos of my own, and the six-second videos the app had put in front of me as a new user did not convince me of the platform's value as a means of expressing oneself.

Like I say: to me, Vine was the beginning of the brain-addled, attention-deficit Internet of today, where no-one is capable of focusing on anything for more than about six seconds. I didn't want to support it back then, and I'm certainly not celebrating it coming back now.

Interestingly, this sort of ties in with something else I wanted to talk about, which was that Metroid Prime 4 previews have been met with a certain degree of consternation following the reveal of an apparently quite annoying "sidekick" character. I can't comment on whether or not he actually is annoying myself as I haven't really looked into any of the coverage as yet, but what I did find interesting was the following Bluesky post:

Alexa Ray Corriea
‪@alexaray.bsky.social‬

You wanna know why we're having nag line discourse in 2025? Because developers know we're fighting an attention economy war we'll lose no matter what. Players don't read, have TikTok open next to them, god forbid we are scared you miss something and then blame us for not giving you all the info.

"Nag lines" are those moments when a sidekick or companion character continually bugs you to do something in a video game, with one of the most notorious examples being the now-elderly "Shoot the Hinges" YouTube video. These days they tend to be a little more elaborate, but they're widely disliked by a lot of people for either stating the obvious or giving away things that the player could have otherwise discovered organically. In some cases, games that launched with extensive "nag lines" ended up patching them out after people complaining — Alexa Ray Corriea, author of the above Bluesky post, cites Horizon: Forbidden West as just one example.

But she also has a point. Nag lines are there because of the not-unreasonable assumption that a statistically significant proportion of people playing a game aren't really paying attention. Whether it's because they're listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video or stream, scrolling through social media, posting in group chats, flipping through TikTok, swiping people on Tinder or whatever it is people do these days, their attention isn't 100% on the game, because today's Internet practically encourages you to act like an ADHD squirrel rather than settling down and focusing on anything.

And to me, Vine was the beginning of that. Actually, that's not quite true; I was very resistant to joining Twitter in the beginning, because I wasn't a big fan of the microblogging format for similar reasons, but I got over that and found some value there. Vine, though… I never found that value there. I never understood what it was for, or what the appeal was. And I firmly believe that Vine and its subsequent imitators like TikTok had an incredibly adverse effect on anyone who found themselves addicted to them, because they normalised and commodified short-form content and turned people into dribbling consumers of content.

I feel like this is a problem we need to address. Actually, I feel like we're long overdue addressing it. Because at the moment the norm, particularly in big-budget triple-A games, which is where "nag lines" are most frequently heard, is to pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of attention span and intelligence, and that results in experiences that are annoying and patronising to anyone even slightly above that minimum basic standard.

But the statistics back it up, unfortunately. Do you know the most depressing YouTube analytic? It's "watch time", which indicates that a significant number of people will click into a video, watch it for less than ten seconds and then click away. The same is true with websites; the assumption — which is, unfortunately, not too far from the truth — is that people will decide whether or not to stick around within less than five seconds.

There is so much competing for our attention online at any given moment, and the modern Internet has conditioned many of us to believe that we must consume as much content as possible, as quickly as possible. A member of a Discord I'm in once proudly explained how they "kept up" with all the content they wanted to consume, and it was a frankly terrifying account of watching some things at double speed, trusting AI summaries (which, let's not forget, are frequently wrong) and never actually taking time to really enjoy and digest something.

I am, at least, thankful that the entire world hasn't gone the short-form, attention deficit route. I am presently playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that game couldn't be further away from this whole philosophy if it tried. No nag lines, no pressuring you to constantly be doing, no constantly rewarding you for every little meaningless thing you do, no achievements, no social features — just a big ol' world to explore, with lots of things scattered throughout it that you'll only ever stumble across by accident if you're being curious, taking your time and really drinking everything in. (I say all this with the caveat that the Switch 2 version features a certain amount of ADHD gaming features such as a "daily bonus" you can access via your mobile phone, but all this stuff is easily ignored — and by that I mean "it doesn't appear unless you specifically ask for it", not "it only does a few little pop-ups" — and can be turned off altogether if you find it intrusive.)

I've said many times over the last couple of decades that I don't feel like the modern world is built for me at all. And I mean that in numerous different ways. I am thankful that I still have a few ways to escape from the sheer manic energy of it all, but I worry that one day it won't be possible to hide from all this any longer.

In the meantime, "diVine" can go fuck itself. Actually, no. I will give it a moment's praise for the fact it is specifically weeding out AI-generated slop and not allowing it on the platform. But then I will still tell it to go fuck itself.

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The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate "short-form content" in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you're considering it… don't. I won't watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won't go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I've actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole "half a sentence" thumbnail format. I didn't click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go "[our brand] is _________" and expect people to "fill in the blank". And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn't matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That's all that mattered.

It's the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don't want to click on their videos because it's rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of "best moments" that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you've enjoyed a complete story by the time you've left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert's show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that's a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I'm writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we're learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it's still relatable to anyone either going through that "20s to 30s" part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don't really work as standalone "jokes" because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it's frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It's just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have "time" for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they're doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I'm aware there's nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it's exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.