Musk tells Twitter engineers to bring Vine back from the dead

AppleInsider

Rumors of a revival of looping video app Vine may be confirmed, with a report claiming Twitter owner Elon Musk telling engineers to bring the app back.

Elon Musk and the Vine app icon

The Twitter purchase by Elon Musk has resulted in a lot of changes about the microblogging service, and even more speculation. It seems that some relating to the Twitter-owned Vine could be coming true.

According to multiple sources of Axios, Musk has ordered engineers at Twitter to reboot Vine. It's thought that a revival could be prepared by the end of 2022, though it could still be a challenge.

Engineers have already been assigned to look at the code, which hasn't been maintained or updated since the service shut down in 2016. One report source said "it needs a lot of work."

It is likely that a lot of work will be required to get Vine working. In a tweet by Sara Beykpour, a former Vine staffer who also led its shutdown, the codebase is at least six years old, and some elements are more than ten years old.

"You don't want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over," the tweet advises.

This is probably advisable due to possible API changes, security concerns, and other elements that will need maintenance before launch. The task may be simplified if engineers leverage the video-related code in Twitter, but that could be problematic in its own right.

Bring back Vine?

-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

October 31, 2022

The rumors of a return for Vine were bolstered by Musk himself, who launched a poll asking "Bring back Vine?" on Sunday. After 4 million votes, the "Y" option managed to gain an almost 70% share.

The Vine move is the latest for Musk, who has already ordered for a change to the verification system to require a $20 maintenance fee, as well as firing the CEO and top executives directly after acquisition.

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darkvader

Just what we need, another looping video social media platform controlled by the Chinese government.

DAalseth

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

ophello

darkvader said:

Just what we need, another looping video social media platform controlled by the Chinese government.

Um...how exactly is Vine, a US company, going to be owned and operated by China?

Why do you actually believe in demonstrably false things?

cfilipponi

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

I'm sure you know.  What companies do you own?  

ophello

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

Well this is just false. He has already brought in a team of engineers to help. Furthermore, he's not firing useful people. There were 10 managers for every one coder. Elon Musk knows how to create and run extremely efficient companies. And to argue otherwise is either due to overwhelming ignorance, or just plain hatred of Musk. So which one are you?

larryjw

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

Tanking both Twitter and Tesla would be a great ending. Then perhaps take down Facebook as a text focus. 

DAalseth

cfilipponi said:

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

I'm sure you know.  What companies do you own?  

I don’t need to be a fireman to know when the building is going up in smoke. 

lkrupp

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

Well, there was no ‘board’ to fire once he took over. Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company. It’s privately owned by Musk now. We’ll never know its financial status, how money it is making or losing, no quarterly reports to investors, no analysts jawboning about its future, just Musk haters hating.

bloggerblog

I believe this will be a great opportunity for Twitter. Video is key to success for social media outlets 

22july2013

ophello said:

darkvader said:

Just what we need, another looping video social media platform controlled by the Chinese government.

Um...how exactly is Vine, a US company, going to be owned and operated by China?
Why do you actually believe in demonstrably false things?

Maybe he meant to say the Saudi Arabian government, because one of Musk's co-investors in Twitter is from there. Saudi Arabia scores 30% lower than China on the democracy index (2.0 vs 3.0). I'm not impressed with Musk teaming up with this guy.

abcnews said: Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said Friday that he and his Kingdom Holding Company rolled over a combined $1.89 billion in existing Twitter shares, making them the company's largest shareholder after Musk. 

Skeptical

I detest this guy with the heat of a thousand white hot suns. 

9secondkox2

Twitter has needed video for a long time now. 

It’s so archaic. Go here and post a few words. It’s hugely over staffed for such a minuscule scope of service. It’s laughable to even call it a tech company. 

“Oh it’s so difficult to add a check mark icon. So difficult to verify someone.” It’s like The 87,000 extra IRS agents to make sure you really, truly don’t have any Nickels hidden in a piggy bank somewhere. The Twitter staff seems employed to simply make life difficult for Sane people who possess critical thinking skills. Nobody needs them. Fire the whole group. Get some actual tech people, people with work ethic, morals, respect for differing viewpoints, and people with vision to push things forward. Twitter is the same as it was when it launched. It’s an old, limited, broken waste of time. But not anymore. 

I’d love to see Twitter buy Vimeo and refine that already built tech for organizeable long and short form video as well as live streaming. 

danox

cfilipponi said:

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

I'm sure you know.  What companies do you own?  

Eight posts a bot?

danox

9secondkox2 said:

Twitter has needed video for a long time now. 

It’s so archaic. Go here and post a few words. It’s hugely over staffed for such a minuscule scope of service. It’s laughable to even call it a tech company. 

“Oh it’s so difficult to add a check mark icon. So difficult to verify someone.” It’s like The 87,000 extra IRS agents to make sure you really, truly don’t have any Nickels hidden in a piggy bank somewhere. The Twitter staff seems employed to simply make life difficult for Sane people who possess critical thinking skills. Nobody needs them. Fire the whole group. Get some actual tech people, people with work ethic, morals, respect for differing viewpoints, and people with vision to push things forward. Twitter is the same as it was when it launched. It’s an old, limited, broken waste of time. But not anymore. 

I’d love to see Twitter buy Vimeo and refine that already built tech for organizeable long and short form video as well as live streaming. 

For? 2 billion or 4 billion?

DAalseth

ophello said:

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

Well this is just false. He has already brought in a team of engineers to help. Furthermore, he's not firing useful people. There were 10 managers for every one coder. Elon Musk knows how to create and run extremely efficient companies. And to argue otherwise is either due to overwhelming ignorance, or just plain hatred of Musk. So which one are you?

Musk WAS a brilliant entrepreneur, not engineer, entrepreneur. He always hires people to do the hard technical heavy lifting. He has however fallen for the common trap that a lot of rich/famous people fall into. He has started to believe he can’t fail. He’s started to believe his own publicity.  You know how it says on every prospectus, “Prior performance does not guarantee future results”, well that’s the case with every new venture. In this case Musk is going into something he doesn’t know anything about, is a mess, and has at best barely made a profit. He’s bringing in a bunch of engineers who will take how long to get up to speed on the systems? They are not interchangeable parts, even the best take some time to learn the systems, but he’s showing signs of trying to get rid of the old ones before they cost him some money. That means the moral of the remaining staff will drop through the floor. I suspect the best and brightest are already sending out feelers for new positions. So he will have a green staff, without the really capable people to teach them how to work the system, and vague plans to revolutionize the it. Then with his history, especially in recent years, those plans will be revised regularly giving them a moving target. There are already rumbling from the user base that he’s going to destroy Twitter so any move he makes will be greeted with howls of protest. Couple that with the plans he’s talked about that are self contradictory, and in some cases impossible, and you have something I wouldn’t bet on. 

I USED to have a lot of respect for Musk. His erratic behaviour and stupid statements in recent years have caused myself, and a lot of other people to lose that respect. We’ll see if he can pull this rabbit out, but I suspect, win or lose, he will spend a hell of a lot more than he already has in trying to do so.

zeus423

Time will tell.

mikethemartian

Skeptical said:

I detest this guy with the heat of a thousand white hot suns. 

I don’t hate the guy and never knew much about him before this past year but he really seems to be a flaky personality. Kills my desire to buy a Tesla.

chadbag

JP234 said:

All the more reason not to get a Twitter account. Or deactivate the one you have.

Get out of your echo chamber, and be in the world, people!

Lol.  You mean the echo chamber it was?   

danox

DAalseth said:

ophello said:

DAalseth said:

So he wants this done, and reports are he’s going to fire most of the staff, and this isn’t the only nearly impossible task he wants the programmers to do, and he’s fired the CEO and the board and is running the place single handedly. 

Oh this is going to end badly LMAO

Well this is just false. He has already brought in a team of engineers to help. Furthermore, he's not firing useful people. There were 10 managers for every one coder. Elon Musk knows how to create and run extremely efficient companies. And to argue otherwise is either due to overwhelming ignorance, or just plain hatred of Musk. So which one are you?

Musk WAS a brilliant entrepreneur, not engineer, entrepreneur. He always hires people to do the hard technical heavy lifting. He has however fallen for the common trap that a lot of rich/famous people fall into. He has started to believe he can’t fail. He’s started to believe his own publicity.  You know how it says on every prospectus, “Prior performance does not guarantee future results”, well that’s the case with every new venture. In this case Musk is going into something he doesn’t know anything about, is a mess, and has at best barely made a profit. He’s bringing in a bunch of engineers who will take how long to get up to speed on the systems? They are not interchangeable parts, even the best take some time to learn the systems, but he’s showing signs of trying to get rid of the old ones before they cost him some money. That means the moral of the remaining staff will drop through the floor. I suspect the best and brightest are already sending out feelers for new positions. So he will have a green staff, without the really capable people to teach them how to work the system, and vague plans to revolutionize the it. Then with his history, especially in recent years, those plans will be revised regularly giving them a moving target. There are already rumbling from the user base that he’s going to destroy Twitter so any move he makes will be greeted with howls of protest. Couple that with the plans he’s talked about that are self contradictory, and in some cases impossible, and you have something I wouldn’t bet on. 

I USED to have a lot of respect for Musk. His erratic behaviour and stupid statements in recent years have caused myself, and a lot of other people to lose that respect. We’ll see if he can pull this rabbit out, but I suspect, win or lose, he will spend a hell of a lot more than he already has in trying to do so.

 Going to war with tech people at Twitter won’t work out, if you need to make changes do so quietly with some respect, oops too late…… 

Skeptical

mikethemartian said:

Skeptical said:

I detest this guy with the heat of a thousand white hot suns. 

I don’t hate the guy and never knew much about him before this past year but he really seems to be a flaky personality. Kills my desire to buy a Tesla.

I hear you. I bought a VW i.d.3 EV.