For quite some time now, Elon Musk has been promising to bring back Vine. Back in the day, the short-lived TikTok precursor allowed users to post dopey 6-second videos that looped and could be easily shared. However, as the Tesla billionaire’s plans for the short-form video distributor come into view, it increasingly seems like he (as per usual) got us all excited for nothing.
Vine, which was purchased by Twitter in 2012, has been officially dead for a little over half a decade now. After Twitter killed uploads of the app’s videos in 2016, Vine’s archive subsisted for another three years or so until 2019, when the platform pulled support for it. Since then, all that has survived is a nostalgia for those halcyon days when short-form video was novel and joy-inducing, instead of being a grim staple of our increasingly frenetic information landscape.
Musk initially floated the idea of bringing the video-sharing app back in 2022, not long after he purchased Twitter. Since then, he has repeatedly teased the app’s return, much to the delight of site users. Last April, Musk again touched on resurrecting Vine with one of his many X polls. “Bring back Vine?” he asked. A vast majority of respondents voted “yes.” In January, an X user tweeted at Musk, “think it’s time to bring it back.” And the Tesla CEO personally replied, “We’re looking into it.”
However, as Vine’s “return” has approached, it seems increasingly clear that the app may not be exactly how you remember it. On Monday, Musk promised that the archive of old Vine videos would return in some form. However, it seems increasingly doubtful that the app will be an active service that users can use to make new videos. Instead, Musk has implied that Grok’s new AI video generator, Imagine (which, Musk has bragged, can be used to create NSFW material), will act as a replacement.
“Grok Imagine is AI Vine!” Musk wrote, in an X post on Saturday. Little other information was shared, but it left onlookers with the sad suspicion that the new Vine won’t resemble the fun-fueled video clips of yesteryear and will be more about repackaging the AI-generated porn slop that’s taking over everyone’s feeds uninvited.
Is Musk saying that Grok Imagine is the new Vine? Or will a new version of Vine be launched by X, alongside the archive of old videos? It’s all unclear at the moment. If the resurrection of Vine just ends up being Grok’s AI video app, with Musk dubbing it a “return” of Vine, then we will all have been taken for a ride, once again. Gizmodo reached out to X for more information.
That said, it’s not like anybody really needs Vine now. The app occupies a peculiar spot in American tech history, in that it predated many other short-form video services that have gone on to become ubiquitous by copying its business model (see: Reels and TikTok). Yet despite being a pioneer in the category of apps whose primary societal contribution has been the shrinking of our collective attention span, it seems to have found success just a little too early. After Twitter’s acquisition of the app, it enjoyed a few good years before confronting a boom of those competitor apps that ultimately outpaced it.
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