Social media platforms are a bit like kingdoms, each with a different ‘language’ that their subjects use to communicate. These languages are formed via the requirements of the people who ‘live’ there, but also the limitations of the kingdoms themselves. Twitter’s 140-character limit (RIP). Instagram’s strict content filters (see: algospeak). The YouTube algorithm (no real person actually talks like MrBeast). The kingdom of Vine was founded in 2012, and in its first two years on the app store more than 200 million new citizens moved in. But by law, the people were only allowed to communicate via six-second videos, which played on a loop.

Because of these limitations, the language of Vine was extremely dense, straight-to-the-point, and dependent on visual aids. Its humour consisted of quick puns (“Road work ahead? Uh, yeah, I sure hope it does”), ‘random’ situations (“I’m in me mum’s car, broom broom”) and loud, quirky characters who’d instantly stand out on the small screen. As Philippa Snow wrote for Dazed in 2015, this language helped change how our brains behave, and how we process the world around us. But then, just as quickly as it arose, the Vine kingdom began to collapse.

In 2016, the kingdom’s evil overlords (Twitter) announced that they were pulling up the drawbridge. Uploads were disabled in October 2016, and the Vine app was fully discontinued just a few months later. The kingdom has lain dormant ever since, its residents scattered across the World Wide Web. All memories of their former lives, it seemed, were lost forever (or destined to be rehashed as a short, forgettable segment in a ‘Best of Vine’ compilation on YouTube). All that lived on were the remnants of their language, transformed over time as it spread throughout the neighbouring kingdoms of TikTok, Instagram, and X.

Recently, though, came a glimmer of hope, in the hands of an unlikely hero. “Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access,” wrote Elon Musk on August 2, having bought the social platform formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. “So you can post them if you want.” The CEO didn’t reveal many more details, apart from marketing his new “AI Vine” app, Grok Imagine, and it remains to be seen whether he’ll actually follow through on his promise.

And what is Vine does come back? As an act of internet archeology, it could be a pretty big deal, like excavating an ancient Roman ruin – only, instead of digging for treasures on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, we get an X employee clicking through an old, forgotten server, hunting down a video of a potato tied to a ceiling fan. As a platform, though, have we already transcended Vine? Could the old, crumbling kingdom still be fit for purpose?

Some of the architects behind the original Vine have already tried to rebuild it once, in the form of Byte. Opened to the public in 2020, Byte was renamed twice, never really took off, and officially shut down in 2023. But, of course, the most obvious successor to the original app is TikTok. TikTok launched around the same time Twitter announced the closure of Vine but only gained widespread popularity in the late 2010s, so it’s not exactly to blame, however it might stand in the way of Vine’s return. That’s partly because the citizens of TikTok already speak the language of its predecessor: there’s a similar sense of urgency, information density, and desperate appeals to our attention, plus the fact that both platforms play their videos on a loop, leaving no space to reflect (or disconnect). But then, TikTok also takes things to a whole new level.

It may only have been a few years, but Vine is a whole technological age behind the kingdom of TikTok by now. Vine shut down around the same time that other social media companies were going all-in on algorithmic content feeds, where the platform decides what you want to watch, instead of the other way around. TikTok, on the other hand, rose to prominence by fully embracing this new content delivery system – today, its For You page is arguably the most prevalent and powerful example of the technology, and the extreme effects it can have on our brains.

TikTok’s subjects have adapted their language accordingly, priming their speech to the tastes of the machine, and back in the kingdom of Vine this might already sound like an alien tongue. Needless to say, AI slop factories like Musk’s Grok Imagine are going to warp this language even further. It’s nice to imagine that we might return to more human-centric platforms like Vine as a kind of backlash to the new, AI-powered attention economy, but that seems very much like a fairytale fantasy. 

That doesn’t mean that the rediscovery of Vine is worthless today. Like any historical artefact, it could tell us a lot about the present (in this case, social media’s endless and often-incomprehensible content streams) and how we got here. In the future, maybe the Vine archive will even serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone, helping us to decipher seismic shifts in the language of the internet, as new kingdoms rise and fall. Maybe we’ll all be too entranced by six-second blasts of brain-hacking, AI-generated content to care.