Vine’s Significance to Digital History
“Stop, I could’ve dropped my croissant!”
“I don’t have enough money for chicken nuggets.”
“What up, I’m Jared, I’m 19, and I never [redacted] learned how to read.”
These are some of the quotes that come from some of the most popular videos on the platform Vine. These quotes and these videos became quite a phenomenon, even with Vines’s short lifespan. Vine was an app where users could create 6-second-long-looping-videos. Originally created for users to share short clips of their everyday life, the app took on a life of its own allowing users to express themselves more creatively. Vine’s charm was in its simplicity; for those 6 seconds, you had nothing to focus on but the video in front of you. Once the content was digested, you simply scrolled and moved on.
Vine was created by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, and later sold to Twitter for 30 billion dollars in 2013. There were over 200 million people using the Vine platform and it soon became the most downloaded video-sharing app in the market in 2013. Vine was a proven success; its audience was mostly teens and adults. In 2014, Vine became so popular Twitter, made Vine available on Xbox One and also brought forth the creation of Kids Vine to try to target that much younger audience they were missing. As time passed, Vine slowly became outdated because as opposed to its competitors, it refused to innovate. Many advertisers and promoters began to leave the platform because it was not suitable for promoting their products. By 2016, Vine was considered obsolete. It was outshined by Instagram and Snapchat’s new video features. This then led to the demise of Vine in October 2016, when it was announced Vine would no longer allow people to upload videos. Its eventual death came in January 2017, when the app was removed permanently from the app store.
I was on Vine when it was originally created. I stayed on Vine until its death in 2017. For me and a lot of people my age, Vine is still something we enjoy watching. You can find old Vines and Vine compilations uploaded to YouTube and sometimes even uploaded to TikTok. For me, Vine was a great way to distract myself and enjoy some really creative videos. It also connected me to some really interesting creators, who later on shifted themselves from Vine to YouTube, to Instagram, and now to TikTok. I chose Vine as the company to write about because I feel that Vine is what inspired many of the social media features platforms use today.
Today, Vine is still revered as the pioneer for a lot of the current innovations on certain apps. For example, Instagram introduced its 15-second video function, which was quoted by a former Vine executive as, “the beginning of the end for Vine.” TikTok (a popular video streaming app today) allows users to create videos similar to the ones that Vine did, but instead of 6 seconds, they can be up to 60 seconds. Snapchat introduced a video feature that allowed you to send videos to friends (with a time limit of up to 60 seconds). All of these apps that were inspired by Vine are popular today because they took what Vine was based on and improved upon it. Social media would not be what it is today without the existence of Vine.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/style/byte-vine-short-video-apps.html
https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/what-happened-to-vine-app-why-did-vine-die.html
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown
https://businesschief.com/technology-and-ai/rise-and-fall-vine-brief-timeline-1
