Elon Musk says he’s reclaiming Vine’s archives

Elon Musk says he’s getting the grapes back. Over the weekend, the X owner announced that the company was discovering a video archive of a popular short video app that is believed to have been removed and is working on restoring user access.

Vine – It’s like the predecessor of today’s Tiktok, but only had 6 seconds long loop video, but was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the video ambitions of social media platforms. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by fumbling the app’s potential and limiting all new uploads. The following year it was completely aborted, but the user’s archives remained for a while.

Despite the App Store’s lack of presence, Vine still has a place in the collective cultural consciousness of the Internet. Through online editing of the best grape grapes uploaded to YouTube, and through the careers of many creators who started with Vine, the company continues to live to some extent, and its content continues to be discovered by a new generation.

Musk himself seemed interested in bringing Vine home after buying Twitter in October 2022. In a poll posted on a social media app, he asked Twitter users, “Vine Back Vine?” Nearly 70% responded “Yes.” Axios reported at the time that Twitter was dedicated to working with Vine Reboot, but nothing happened.

However, it is unclear whether Mask has grape ambitions beyond bringing the archives back online. In the same post about Vine restoration, he also touted Grok’s new video creation feature, Grok Imagine, is available to X Premium+ subscribers as “AI Vine.” It suggests that his interest in video creation is no longer in lying to human creativity, but in the encouragement of human-directed AI.

It is yet to be seen whether Musk will actually fulfill his promise, as XPost could have been another way of drawing attention to Grok Ai, rather than representing real efforts within the company to make old grapes available for reposts.