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Elon Musk considers bringing Vine back from the dead

All sorts of changes could happen to the bird app now that Elon Musk has completed his purchase of Twitter. But bringing back Vine wasn’t on our bingo card. While the extinct short-form video app is beloved, bringing it back didn’t seem like it would be an immediate priority as the conpmay has other, more pressing concerns that need to be addressed.

But a recent Twitter poll from the new owner of Twitter himself seems to indicate otherwise. On Sunday night, Musk tweeted out a Twitter poll that simply asked: “Bring back Vine?”

Bring back Vine?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

Now, it should be noted that the existence of the poll doesn’t necessarily mean Musk will certainly bring it back. But it does seem to indicate that he’s considering it. And the response to his poll from Twitter users is pretty robust: It’s already received over 3.5 million votes as of this writing and the poll still has 10 hours left.

If you’re not familiar, Vine was a short-form video-sharing app. And those videos were really short: 6 seconds. But for all their brevity, Vines often packed a punch when it came to humor and entertainment value. Vine launched in 2013, was purchased by Twitter, and then only lasted for a few years until it was shut down in 2016. But though it only lasted a short time, it was loved and it’s definitely been missed since its departure.

In fact, just this past April, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey apparently tweeted a reply to another tweet about the now-defunct app. In Dorsey’s tweeted reply, he apparently expressed regret about shutting it down.

If Musk were to bring Vine back, it’s a move that would definitely have its supporters and would play on people’s nostalgia for a simpler time in social media history. But if Vine does come back, what could it look like? An interaction between Musk and another Twitter account could give us a possible hint, as Musk seemed to agree with a suggestion from the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley Twitter account:

💯

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

The possibility of the resurrection of Vine is an interesting concept, especially when it comes to TikTok, whose current competitors keep trying to catch up to it with little success and often much backlash. Which begs the question: What if the only true competitor for TikTok is its beloved short-form video predecessor?

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Anita George
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
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