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I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because

I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry. At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them. That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves. Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new. The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.

nikofeyn 6y ago
just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.
- wy35 6y ago
  Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition. But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dilap 6y ago
My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?
  - creddit 6y ago
    The division they have helped foment in the US is pretty impressive.
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      People have been this divided for a long time. Social Media just helps exhume it better. Started in the 50s.
      - spanhandler 6y ago
        How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
      - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
      - mbesto 6y ago
        My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is. My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
kristopolous 6y ago
History maps to that theory but I would like to think it's coincidental and has more to do with the acumen and aggressiveness of the founders than of any natural generational churn.
TruthSHIFT 6y ago
A crucial feature of new things is that they are often better. Not all new things beat incumbents. Only the good ones win.
- look_lookatme 6y ago
  It's easier when the incumbent shuts down before the competition even begins...
mrkramer 6y ago
Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall. Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- asutekku 6y ago
  Tiktok didn’t really exists at the same timeline as Vine so I wouldn’t say Tiktok won against it.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.
    - abc-xyz 6y ago
      Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.” TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.
      - kantspel 6y ago
        Is the CCP funding ByteDance? Anyway a quick google suggests they made a tidy 3 billion profit (ByteDance as a whole) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html
jimbob45 6y ago
Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine. The blinding fact is that Twitter has never once made a shrewd business movie in ~15 years and is piloted by nimrods. Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.
- abc-xyz 6y ago
  TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    American VCs have lived and died on the “customer count first, profitability later” mantra for the better part of a decade.
- basch 6y ago
  IMHO, this course of events also paints a likely outcome had Twitter acquired Instagram instead of Facebook. Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.
- hn_check 6y ago
  "Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine" The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it. Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg
parliament32 6y ago
>there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use Precisely, although I think it's 50/50 between "what old people use" and "where the corporations live". IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network, places like TikTok are popular because corporate interests haven't shown up yet (basically no ads and very few sponsored posts / product placement).
- rsa25519 6y ago
  > IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network I'm not so sure about this. 80% of my communication happens through Instagram DMs, and I haven't heard a single complaint about advertisements, or Instagram at all. Rather, I see friends browsing content on TikTok (rather than on IG), then re-sharing it through DMs. They browse on TikTok because its For You Page curation makes finding interesting and entertaining content easier than on any other platform I've seen.
  - parliament32 6y ago
    I'm sure it depends a lot on region and social circles. I work in tech, and IG is basically dead other than interacting with businesses with my peers. I also have two sisters in high school who confirm IG isn't really a thing anymore for the younger crowd.
ngold 6y ago
If I had a guess why Facebook has stayed around as long as it has. It started with college students. That quickly became adults that continued to use it into their careers. Skipping the myspace teen generation fad cycle.
bobwernstein 6y ago
facebook was a social network. now it's just a phonebook. Instagram has replaced the social network portion of it for most people. People that want to stay connected but don't want to be social use facebook only. Tiktok is a viral video app. Just like Vine was. Vine failed and left a hole. Tiktok went in and filled that hole. That's it.
throwaway5752 6y ago
How much money was Vine losing or making? I honestly am not aware of their unit economics prior to the shutdown.
bzb3 6y ago
You cannot believe that Twitter did something terribly stupid? “Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg
adelpozo 6y ago
Couldn’t they just rebranded it? Like venmo:paypal?
yelloworangefog 6y ago
> Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it) I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too. My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform. It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform. I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  I wonder if they use IG because there isn't any alternative. Let's say that someday there is a new "teenstagram" launched, and they paid some teenager influencers to drop content there and some cool kids to use and promote it. In my experience as teens, "it's uncool to use a same platform as the one your grandma use".
jbay808 6y ago
> Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new. Periodically launch a new instance of the site, on a different URL, with a different colour scheme and an independent userbase?

nikofeyn 6y ago

just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.

wy35 6y ago
Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition. But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dilap 6y ago

My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.

dimitrios1 6y ago
Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?
- creddit 6y ago
  The division they have helped foment in the US is pretty impressive.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    People have been this divided for a long time. Social Media just helps exhume it better. Started in the 50s.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
    - mbesto 6y ago
      My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is. My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.

kristopolous 6y ago

History maps to that theory but I would like to think it's coincidental and has more to do with the acumen and aggressiveness of the founders than of any natural generational churn.

TruthSHIFT 6y ago

A crucial feature of new things is that they are often better. Not all new things beat incumbents. Only the good ones win.

look_lookatme 6y ago
It's easier when the incumbent shuts down before the competition even begins...

mrkramer 6y ago

Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall. Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asutekku 6y ago
Tiktok didn’t really exists at the same timeline as Vine so I wouldn’t say Tiktok won against it.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.
  - abc-xyz 6y ago
    Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.” TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.
    - kantspel 6y ago
      Is the CCP funding ByteDance? Anyway a quick google suggests they made a tidy 3 billion profit (ByteDance as a whole) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html

jimbob45 6y ago

Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine. The blinding fact is that Twitter has never once made a shrewd business movie in ~15 years and is piloted by nimrods. Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.

abc-xyz 6y ago
TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  American VCs have lived and died on the “customer count first, profitability later” mantra for the better part of a decade.
basch 6y ago
IMHO, this course of events also paints a likely outcome had Twitter acquired Instagram instead of Facebook. Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.
hn_check 6y ago
"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine" The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it. Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg

parliament32 6y ago

>there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use Precisely, although I think it's 50/50 between "what old people use" and "where the corporations live". IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network, places like TikTok are popular because corporate interests haven't shown up yet (basically no ads and very few sponsored posts / product placement).

rsa25519 6y ago
> IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network I'm not so sure about this. 80% of my communication happens through Instagram DMs, and I haven't heard a single complaint about advertisements, or Instagram at all. Rather, I see friends browsing content on TikTok (rather than on IG), then re-sharing it through DMs. They browse on TikTok because its For You Page curation makes finding interesting and entertaining content easier than on any other platform I've seen.
- parliament32 6y ago
  I'm sure it depends a lot on region and social circles. I work in tech, and IG is basically dead other than interacting with businesses with my peers. I also have two sisters in high school who confirm IG isn't really a thing anymore for the younger crowd.

ngold 6y ago

If I had a guess why Facebook has stayed around as long as it has. It started with college students. That quickly became adults that continued to use it into their careers. Skipping the myspace teen generation fad cycle.

bobwernstein 6y ago

facebook was a social network. now it's just a phonebook. Instagram has replaced the social network portion of it for most people. People that want to stay connected but don't want to be social use facebook only. Tiktok is a viral video app. Just like Vine was. Vine failed and left a hole. Tiktok went in and filled that hole. That's it.

throwaway5752 6y ago

How much money was Vine losing or making? I honestly am not aware of their unit economics prior to the shutdown.

bzb3 6y ago

You cannot believe that Twitter did something terribly stupid? “Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg

adelpozo 6y ago

Couldn’t they just rebranded it? Like venmo:paypal?

yelloworangefog 6y ago

> Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it) I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too. My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform. It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform. I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.

fendy3002 6y ago
I wonder if they use IG because there isn't any alternative. Let's say that someday there is a new "teenstagram" launched, and they paid some teenager influencers to drop content there and some cool kids to use and promote it. In my experience as teens, "it's uncool to use a same platform as the one your grandma use".

jbay808 6y ago

> Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new. Periodically launch a new instance of the site, on a different URL, with a different colour scheme and an independent userbase?