So Far, Elon Musk’s Revival of Vine Is Severely Disappointing

For fairly a while now, Elon Musk has been promising to carry again Vine. Again within the day, the short-lived TikTok precursor allowed customers to put up dopey 6-second movies that looped and may very well be simply shared. Nevertheless, because the Tesla billionaire’s plans for the short-form video distributor become visible, it more and more looks as if he (as per ordinary) bought us all excited for nothing.

Vine, which was bought by Twitter in 2012, has been formally lifeless for slightly over half a decade now. After Twitter killed uploads of the app’s movies in 2016, Vine’s archive subsisted for one more three years or so till 2019, when the platform pulled support for it. Since then, all that has survived is a nostalgia for these halcyon days when short-form video was novel and joy-inducing, as a substitute of being a grim staple of our more and more frenetic info panorama.

Musk initially floated the thought of bringing the video-sharing app again in 2022, not lengthy after he purchased Twitter. Since then, he has repeatedly teased the app’s return, a lot to the delight of website customers. Final April, Musk once more touched on resurrecting Vine with one of his many X polls. “Carry again Vine?” he requested. A overwhelming majority of respondents voted “sure.” In January, an X consumer tweeted at Musk, “assume it’s time to carry it again.” And the Tesla CEO personally replied, “We’re trying into it.”

Nevertheless, as Vine’s “return” has approached, it appears more and more clear that the app might not be precisely the way you bear in mind it. On Monday, Musk promised that the archive of old Vine videos would return in some kind. Nevertheless, it appears more and more uncertain that the app might be an lively service that customers can use to make new movies. As a substitute, Musk has implied that Grok’s new AI video generator, Think about (which, Musk has bragged, can be utilized to create NSFW materials), will act as a replacement.

“Grok Think about is AI Vine!” Musk wrote, in an X post on Saturday. Little different info was shared, however it left onlookers with the unhappy suspicion that the brand new Vine gained’t resemble the fun-fueled video clips of yesteryear and might be extra about repackaging the AI-generated porn slop that’s taking on everybody’s feeds uninvited.

Is Musk saying that Grok Think about is the brand new Vine? Or will a brand new model of Vine be launched by X, alongside the archive of previous movies? It’s all unclear for the time being. If the resurrection of Vine simply finally ends up being Grok’s AI video app, with Musk dubbing it a “return” of Vine, then we are going to all have been taken for a trip, as soon as once more. Gizmodo reached out to X for extra info.

That mentioned, it’s not like anyone actually wants Vine now. The app occupies a peculiar spot in American tech historical past, in that it predated many different short-form video companies which have gone on to grow to be ubiquitous by copying its enterprise mannequin (see: Reels and TikTok). But regardless of being a pioneer within the class of apps whose main societal contribution has been the shrinking of our collective consideration span, it appears to have discovered success just a bit too early. After Twitter’s acquisition of the app, it loved a number of good years earlier than confronting a growth of these competitor apps that finally outpaced it.