Elon Musk, who currently labels himself as “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” in this Twitter bio, recently tweeted a poll asking if he should bring back Vine. Over 4 million responses came in, with 69.6% of the people saying “Yes”.
Popular YouTuber Mr. Beast replied saying “If you did that and actually completed with [TikTok] that would be hilarious.”
Elon asked Mr. Beast what he could do to make Vine better than TikTok, to which Mr. Beast replied that there’s no such thing as originality at this point, because every major social platform is trying to mimic TikTok. His best advice was basically that “Whatever you do, make it hard to copy, or it’s a waste of time”.
Vine launched back in 2012, founded by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll. At the time, people were just getting their hands on smartphones and due to this, the popularity skyrocketed. You could say that Vine became the blueprint for many of the short-form video features we see today on almost all social media networks. One particular detail though, Vine was for just 6 seconds of videos, which made it fast and easy to swipe through lots of videos in an endless loop. However, unlike TIkTok, Vine was all about comedy.
Also in 2012, Twitter acquired the app for $30 million. In 2013, Instagram introduced 15-second videos on its platform, causing leading marketers and advertisers to shift their support to Instagram. By the way Vine increased it’s video limit past 6 seconds, ti was too late, leading to its eventual shut down in October 2016.
Reviving Vine may not be a good idea, according to some comments on Twitter, the Vine codebase is over 6 years old, some is even 10 years old. If you had to revive it, you should start over, according to comments.
However, there’s also the feeling that the reason people loved Vine, simply no longer exists. The social media world has changed.