What do you get when you combine the richest man in the world and a social media app that died six years ago? Another hell site.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk is floating the idea of resurrecting Vine, a short-form video app similar to TikTok that was put to rest six years ago. If he summons it back, it’ll be a shell of what it once was; an app that might walk and talk like its precious self, but lacks the soul necessary for its survival. Vine should absolutely not be reborn. And it should certainly not be brought back by Musk.
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It’s just the latest in a dizzying series of maneuvers by the “Chief Twit” since he took over Twitter, fired a ton of staff, ordered employees to print out their code, is planning to charge verified users to keep their badges, and removed some employees abilities to do their content moderation jobs — an invaluable service to slow the spread of misinformation and hate speech — just weeks before midterm elections take place in the U.S.
Why did Twitter kill Vine?
Unlike with most things Musk, this time it doesn’t seem like he’s bluffing, unfortunately. Musk told engineers at Twitter to begin working on a Vine reboot to launch by the end of the year, Axios first reported. It’s a surprising reversal of fate for a failed Twitter product. Twitter bought Vine for $30 million in 2012, but shuttered the app in 2016 — a move that devastated Vine creators and fans. But it simply could not make enough money to stay alive and was losing popularity to apps like Instagram, which added new features at a rate that Vine just couldn’t match, as the Verge reported. The app was fun, but it ultimately wasn’t profitable.
But facts have never stopped Musk from trying to do something. Now that Musk is in the driver’s seat, Twitter engineers are looking at Vine’s old code; code that hasn’t been updated in more than half a decade. Sara Beykpour, whose LinkedIn shows she worked as a senior director of product management at Twitter, tweeted that she worked at Vine and led the shutdown of the app.
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“This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+,” Beykpour wrote. “You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over. trust me on this one guys.”
On Sunday, Musk polled his Twitter followers, asking: “Bring back Vine?” Over 69 percent of his followers said yes.
MrBeast, a creator with 109 million subscribers on YouTube and 15 million followers on Twitter responded, “If you did that and actually competed with TikTok [sic] that’d be hilarious.” To which Musk replied, “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?”
Here’s a suggestion, Elon: Leave Vine alone. The memory of Vine will remain stronger if the app stays in the past. We don’t need a new TikTok.
At its peak, about 100 million people were using Vine every month, according to TechCrunch. Compare that to TikTok, which has a billion users every month; or Instagram, which surpassed 2 billion monthly users in 2021. After Vine was shuttered, most of the more iconic Vines were posted on YouTube and the more successful Vine stars pivoted to Instagram or YouTube before the app officially died.
A zombie app has no soul
If Musk’s work at Twitter is any indication of his ability to run a social media company, it should go without saying that he should probably keep his paws off other social media sites, too. Not only because he has more money than any human being should (and because of that or in spite of it, he’s pretty terrible and so embarrassingly out of touch) but also because he seems to be wrong a lot of the time.
Consider when he tweeted that he would donate $6 billion to end world hunger, and then didn’t do that. Or when he claimed in March 2020 that people worried about Covid-19 were “dumb” and said the U.S. would have “close to zero new cases” of Covid-19 by the end of April 2020. He’s also tweeted that “pronouns suck;” he tweeted a picture of Bill Gates and said “in case u need to lose a boner fast;” and he famously runs Tesla, a company with racist and sexist environments that employees have called a “modern-day sweatshop.”
Musk has done just about nothing to let Twitter users feel confident about his capability to run a single social media site, let alone resurrect one.
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Beyond my firm belief that Musk is unable to resurrect Vine in any positive way, there’s still the issue of recreating the magic that was Vine. It would be impossible to have the app the same way we once did no matter who’s recreating it.
Vine was great, but its greatness relied on an organic system — to fill your feed, you followed friends, family, and influencers whose content you wanted to spot. For Vine to be successful in 2023 and beyond, your community would have to all migrate back onto Vine in order for it to resemble the app we once loved. But Vine existed in a different era of the internet. It existed before Donald Trump, COVID-19, and the misinformation scandals that have forced social media sites to face a heavy reckoning. And in the six years since Vine’s death, our brains have become primed to respond to algorithmic recommendations on apps like Instagram and TikTok.
All the stars who made Vine what it was have since moved on to other apps or have quit the internet altogether. King Bach moved to TikTok and YouTube, and started acting on the big screen; Lele Pons stars in a YouTube Original docuseries about her life and hosts her own podcast on Spotify; Rudy Mancuso has a successful career on YouTube; and the list goes on. There’s no way to bring back the past when society has continued evolving without it. We simply no longer consume media in the same way. Furthermore, a newly revived Vine wouldn’t be filling a void of media. We already have TikTok for short-form viral videos; Instagram reels for reposting your TikTok videos; and YouTube for posting collections of TikTok videos.
Beyond being a weird ego boost for a rich man and his fans, what purpose would a Vine reboot even fulfill?
Social media apps, much like villains in The Dark Knight, have two real options, as Harvey Dent says: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Vine died a hero. Let it rest.
