If there’s one thing we’ve learned from his US$44 billion acquisition of Twitter, it’s that whatever Elon Musk wants, Elon Musk gets. And apparently, what Elon Musk has now developed an appetite for – aside from the tears of fired Twitter employees – is the dead social media platform Vine.
The world’s richest man, Twitter’s sole board member, and self-styled “Chief Twit” tested the waters by tweeting a poll asking: “Bring back Vine?” Close to five million votes later, the answer was clear, with 69.6% of users swinging towards “Yes.”
Before long, the mere suggestion of Musk’s intentions to reboot the TikTok predecessor attracted widespread attention, including that of prominent YouTuber (and lowkey TikTok dissident) MrBeast, who goaded the oft-controversial billionaire into pulling the trigger.
RELATED: TikTok Will Be Abandoned Next Year, According To MrBeast
“If you did that and actually competed with TikTok that’d be hilarious,” replied MrBeast.
Elon Musk followed up by asking how he could make Vine 2.0 better than TikTok.
“No one is original anymore, whatever you do will be on every other platform the next month unless it has a deep moat. YouTube has shorts, Instagram has reels, Reddit, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. all copied TikTok.”
“Whatever you do, make it hard to copy or it’s a waste of time IMO.”
Just how seriously is Musk taking his latest endeavour? According to multiple sources, he’s already instructed Twitter engineers to dig up the Vine code base for a digital reboot that could apparently be ready by the end of 2022.
But this might be a much larger job than anticipated.
“This code is six+ years old,” pointed out Sara Beykpour, Twitter’s former senior director of product management.
“Some of it is 10+. You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over.”
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Prior to its shutdown in 2017, Vine was the hottest property when it came to social media platforms.
The Twitter-owned, short-form video hosting service burst onto the scene in January of 2013, right as the adoption of smartphones took off in earnest, and would effectively mark the beginning of a new era. One informed by microblogging and disturbingly short attention spans.
Despite the app’s overwhelming popularity, amassing well over 200 million active users at its height, Twitter never found a way to properly capitalise on it. As Kurt Wagner of Bloomberg explains, the entire operation was mismanaged, the business simply never materialised, and Twitter was unable (or unwilling) to pay the very creators who made the app tick.
Eventually, the population migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, eventually YouTube and TikTok/Musical.ly, which proved to be the final nail in the coffin.
Should Elon Musk successfully bring Vine back from the dead, however, it’ll certainly be a story for the ages.
Side note: between this ongoing development and what we know about YouTube Shorts vis-a-vis audience growth and financial incentives starting from 2023, TikTok is in real danger of becoming another ghost town platform (see above).
