Of all the things that Elon Musk is or is not, the one true value that he does bring to his companies is attention, with his constant desire to be the main topic of conversation helping to keep his companies in the spotlight, for good and/or bad reasons.
This week, amid layoffs at Tesla, and reports of compounding failures with its Cybertruck, along with a reversal of his public stand against the Brazilian Government at X, and more reports of the platform amplifying neo-Nazi content, Musk is once again trying to redirect attention elsewhere.
And clearly, based on the article that you’re reading, that is having some effect.
And the X (formerly Twitter) team is actually doing something on this front, with X engineer Christopher Stanley sharing an active link to Logan Paul’s old Vine page:
Vine was originally shut down in 2017, with all Vine clips eventually being deactivated to reduce server costs. But at the least, the X crew are exploring the app’s code base, and how it could be reignited for a new audience.
Musk has floated the idea of bringing back Vine several times since taking over Twitter back in November 2022.
Conceptually, Vine is the predecessor to TikTok, and TikTok is now a billion-user platform, so Vine, as the theory goes, could also be massive, if X were to bring it back. But it is also worth noting that Vine was never as popular as you probably think (reaching 200 million users at peak), and that Vine also collapsed because Twitter couldn’t work out how to make money from it, and ensure that top Vine creators got paid.
As such, I’m not sure that Elon and Co. would be able to monetize it that well either, while it would also lack TikTok’s secret sauce, being its super-attuned algorithm.
Essentially, Vine 2.0 wouldn’t be as great as many hope, would likely not end up being overly popular, and is probably not a great idea.
But again, it helps Elon get more attention, and divert it as needed.
