After Twitter, Elon Musk’s Goal Might be to Takeover Long-Lost Vine

 After the Twitter buyout, Elon Musk is after the dead Vine, the video app that was shut down in 2012

According to a story from Axios, Elon Musk, the billionaire who recently paid $44 billion for the Twitter buyout, has instructed engineers at the social media giant to consider reviving Vine, the video app that Twitter bought in 2012 and shut down barely four years later after it had launched.

Earlier this week, Musk altered his Twitter bio to read "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator." On Sunday, Musk posted a poll asking if he should bring back Vine, to which 70% of users responded yes. If Vine were to ever be revived, it would face tough competition from websites like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram that provide short-form video content. And given that Vine's previous code "needs a lot of work," as one Twitter employee who talked with Axios put it, it's unclear how much sense it would make to use it as opposed to starting from scratch after the Twitter deal.

It's an unexpected turn of events for a failing Twitter product. Twitter paid $30 million for Vine in 2012 but later discontinued it in 2016 to the dismay of the app's creators and users. In contrast, Instagram was gaining popularity and adding new features at a rate that Vine simply could not compete with, according to the Verge. Vine simply could not make enough money to survive. The app was entertaining, but eventually, it wasn't successful.

However, Musk has never let the truth stop him from trying something new. Now that Musk is in charge Twitter programmers are looking into Vine's outdated code, which hasn't been updated in more than a decade. Sara Beykpour, who is listed as a senior director of product management at Twitter on LinkedIn, said in a tweet that she worked at Vine and oversaw the closure of the service.

TechCrunch estimates that at its peak, 100 million individuals were using Vine per month. Compare that to Instagram, which will top 2 billion monthly users in 2021, or TikTok, which has a billion users per month. Before Vine was officially discontinued, the majority of its most famous Vine clips were uploaded to YouTube, and its most popular users switched to Instagram or YouTube.

Musk should stay away from other social media platforms as well, if his work at Twitter is any indicator of his abilities to lead a social media company. Not just because he has more money than any human being ought to have, but also because he frequently seems to be in error.

Musk has essentially done nothing to inspire Twitter users with confidence in his capacity to manage even a single social media platform, much less bring one back. Vine cannot be positively revived by Musk, and it remains a challenge to recapture the enchantment that was Vine. No matter who recreates the program, it cannot exist in the same form as it did before.

Vine had a terrific organic system that allowed users to follow friends, relatives, and influencers whose material you were interested in seeing to fill your feed. The community would need to return to Vine for it to resemble the app they previously adored if Vine is to be successful in 2023 and beyond. However, Vine was active during a different internet period. It was there before Donald Trump, COVID-19, and the defamation scandals that have made social media platforms bear the brunt of harsh consequences. Our minds have also evolved to be responsive to algorithmic recommendations on apps like Instagram and TikTok in the six years since Vine's demise.

All the celebrities who helped make Vine what it had either switched to other apps or have given up on the internet. Lele Pons appears in a YouTube Original docuseries about her life and hosts her podcast on Spotify. Rudy Mancuso has a flourishing career on YouTube. The list goes on. King Bach migrated to TikTok and YouTube and began performing on the big screen. Since society has continued to develop in the absence of the past, there is no way to bring it back. The way we consume media has just changed. Additionally, a newly reborn Vine wouldn't constitute a media gap. We already have YouTube for releasing compilations of short-form popular films, and Instagram reels for reposting your TikTok videos.

What use would a Vine relaunch even provide, besides being an odd ego boost for a wealthy man and his fans? It is to be seen.