Vine Doesn't Need to Come Back

Time and time again, Elon Musk teases the idea of the short video platform Vine returning. This seems more likely to happen sometime soon as Elon said he found an archive of old vines on the Twitter servers. This is funny because direct URLs to vines continued to work after Vine shut down, and they could be embedded on Twitter. At least, they could, until Elon shut that down. This means that either Elon removed the feature and expected people to become excited when he brought it back, or he actually tried deleting all the vines on Twitter servers^[1], and I don't know which is more pathetic.

With a Vine relaunch somewhat possible, I'm here to say why I don't care (and to be honest, neither does anybody else) and think it's a terrible idea.

Vine kinda sucked actually

Most people say that the videos on Vine were great, but that's because they only remember the golden videos, or consumed Vine through YouTube compilations. When I hear some people who actually used the platform talk about it, they bring up that most of the videos sucked, and you would only see a good video every once in awhile.

Plus, vines were short. The maximum video length for most people was only 6 seconds. For comparison, when TikTok "launched," the maximum duration was 15 seconds, and later increased to a minute. There is only so much you can do in 6 seconds. Eventually, the duration limit on Vine was increased to a minute, but this was late down the platforms life. There is a reason TikTok increased the time limit to 3 minutes, then 15, then an hour.

Other Platforms Exist

The spirit of Vine was later continued by platforms such as Instagram, and later down the line TikTok. TikTok is basically the same thing, short, viral videos. The biggest difference is TikToks aren't a square, they can be longer, and things other than comedy skits and edits exist (imagine trying to give political commentary on Vine). Sure, content farms and bots have somewhat ruined that spirit (that's why I'm not mentioning YouTube Shorts here), but people frequently comment "this would've done numbers on Vine" under videos.

Twitter Already Has a Video App

"X Video" (actual name) is a video platform that uses videos from Twitter. Granted, it's still only on TV and nobody uses it, but it still exists. Either Vine as a platform will be relaunched, or (probably the more likely option) videos on Twitter will be rebranded to Vines. Which brings up the last point:

Elon Musk

Basically nobody would want Vine to come back from Elon Musk. My assumption is that videos on Twitter will be rebranded to a Vine, and the Vine feed will be videos from Twitter. This somewhat exists on the Twitter app already, as there is a button for a Reels style feed on the Twitter navigation bar. And the problem is that it pulls whatever, with Elon's biases. You will see a video related to your interests, followed by porn, followed by a 2 hour long podcast, followed by Russian drone footage.

Additionally, Elon is stating that the new Vine will be "AI powered," which sounds terrible, or it just means you can ask Grok about videos. Either way, nobody wants this.