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Why did Twitter end up killing Vine? Seems like a bad decision now since TikTok is pretty much a direct replacement. I thought Vine was quite popular back in th

Why did Twitter end up killing Vine? Seems like a bad decision now since TikTok is pretty much a direct replacement. I thought Vine was quite popular back in the day.

dominotw 6y ago
My group of friends used to use Vine all the time. Never used twitter. I was quite shocked when they killed it.
mrkramer 6y ago
I wonder how Twitter is even alive because the amount of mismanagement that happened in the last 10 years is staggering.
- jl6 6y ago
  Winner-takes-all-network-effect-first-mover-advantage.
- adventured 6y ago
  A spectacular example of how hard it can be to remove a networked product/service once it's entrenched. You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place. People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world. At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there). To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action. MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades). I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  Twitter has pretty much captured the bite-sized, piecemeal form of Internet-based content in tweets and such.
moneytide1 6y ago
I wondered the same thing. It's the exact same service that just changes hands every few years under a new brand. In grade school before the internet, this occurred through physical products. My first grade trend was Yo Yo (Yomega, Brainstorm, Duncan), second grade Pokemon trading cards (Digimon, Magic, Yu Gi Oh), third grade finger skateboards (TechDeck), fourth and fifth segways into middle school when social systems are developing so its clothes brand trend pursuit which is when I checked out because video games were starting to get interesting. Phones and Xanga/Myspace arrived roundabout when I got my driver's license. I'm sure there were similar toy brand trends pre-covid when kids were still seeing each other every day and sharing physical toys. TikTok released some official report the other day in compliance with whatever legal motions were recently filed, and it keeps saying the word "clusters" when referring to users. I guess it's just yet another company that wants to compete over access to "clusters" of users aged 12-35 (that's the widest age range I would expect to be concerned with the latest communication app offering that enables the exact same utility they already had with Vine/Snap/Tik).
grenoire 6y ago
Not-really-affiliated-but-kind-of Byte (https://byte.co/ https://byte.co/) totally failed with its launch, such a shame.
- zedpoeticbits 6y ago
  It has failed? How so? I checked them out when they first launched and they seemed to be doing pretty great. What happened?
- untog 6y ago
  I have Byte and browse it every now and then. Maybe it failed if the only metric of success is hockey stick growth, but when I open it I see an active community. If it does well enough to be self-sustainable then I consider that a success. Not everything has to be Silicon Valley level stratospheric.
bzb5 6y ago
Mark Zuckerberg: “Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”
- tyingq 6y ago
  The irony is heavy.
  - pletsch 6y ago
    Facebook isn't a mess business-wise, they print money
    - adventured 6y ago
      Not only has Facebook always run their business in a vastly superior way in terms of cost in the system, they never went through something equivalent to the fail whale mess that plagued Twitter. Facebook's performance problems have been minor compared to what Twitter has gone through. As a business, Twitter should be far more profitable than they are, their profit margin is 1/3 that of Facebook at the same level of sales (2011 for Facebook), despite having 1/2 the number of users that Facebook had at that point time.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      I was referring more generally to how they print money (gold mine) despite, or maybe because of, a user and privacy hostile experience (clown car).
cowmix 6y ago
Thank you! When my kids tried to explain TikTok to me I responded, "So it is Vine?"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tyingq 6y ago
My kids still watch Vine compilations on YouTube, and they are mystified as to why it was shut down.
- jug 6y ago
  There were even celebrities using it to make funny videos. They had good timing and foresaw where social media was going. Baffling how they couldn’t monetize it.
xwdv 6y ago
I don’t know why people say this. Vine was nothing like TikTok. The editing tools of TikTok are vastly superior and lead to much higher quality videos with higher probability of being worth watching. Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Good for some laughs, but ultimately vapid and shallow. By the time they even wanted to experiment with longer format content they were done. That’s not even mentioning cultural differences.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  > Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Isn't this what Tiktok is? I thought it was mostly tweens dancing and lip syncing.
  - untog 6y ago
    They can both be summed up as "meme like content" but beyond that they're really very different. I'm not sure why the OP is being downvoted, really.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Try actually using TikTok. For more than a few minutes.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - silveroriole 6y ago
      I tried it. The majority of videos for a new user account came up as either incredibly inappropriate videos of tweens or incredibly racist videos of tweens (seriously, I was surprised at how many racist/pedophile jokes came up). Maybe if you curate your liked videos you can get out of that, but I genuinely felt uncomfortable using it as a 30yo.
      - xwdv 6y ago
        I have no problem consistently getting older TikTokkers. I like their content and the algos oblige.
pjc50 6y ago
The lead Viners demanded to be paid while Twitter completely failed to monetise it. https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t...
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I can’t really feel bad for the Viners. I sympathize with the idea that Twitter is/was mooching off free content, but at the same time: One should never make content with the expectation of getting paid, and then post on a free website that doesn’t pay anyone.
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    The thing with tiktok, it’s really easy for content creators to insert links to their websites, merch, other social medias into videos so it allows them to make some money from interested users.
    - rchaud 6y ago
      Whereas US-centric apps like Instagram do everything possible to prevent users from leaving the walled garden. "Link in bio" is commonplace for numerous accounts. User-hostile and completely antithetical to the idea of an interlinked web.
      - rimunroe 6y ago
        I've never seen more than one link in a person's profile on TikTok, and "link in profile" is still a common phrase on there.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Vine was delightful. A lot of funny stuff on it all the time. I think Twitter was incompetent when trying to make it a business. It’s the Minecraft effect. Just because a person or organization hits it huge once doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing and will be able to repeat success.
vxNsr 6y ago
Twitter couldn’t figure out a monetization strategy. Also the main reason tiktok grew so popular is bec of their algo, good algos is something twitter sucks at. Finally the idea of using an algo to surface content the way tiktok is doing is actually novel and wasn’t really apparent 5 years ago.
- apahwa 6y ago
  I think I'm missing something. why was it novel to use an algo to surface content 5 years ago? Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc have both been doing that for a very long time is there something unique about how tiktok is doing it?
dghughes 6y ago
I'd say that is the business model Tik Tok "WTF happened to Vine"? Vine was popular but not exploited (for lack of a better term) so Tik Tok picked up where Vine left off.
sassycassie 6y ago
BRING BACK VINE

Why did Twitter end up killing Vine? Seems like a bad decision now since TikTok is pretty much a direct replacement. I thought Vine was quite popular back in the day.

dominotw 6y ago

My group of friends used to use Vine all the time. Never used twitter. I was quite shocked when they killed it.

mrkramer 6y ago

I wonder how Twitter is even alive because the amount of mismanagement that happened in the last 10 years is staggering.

jl6 6y ago
Winner-takes-all-network-effect-first-mover-advantage.
adventured 6y ago
A spectacular example of how hard it can be to remove a networked product/service once it's entrenched. You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place. People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world. At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there). To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action. MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades). I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.
cvhashim 6y ago
Twitter has pretty much captured the bite-sized, piecemeal form of Internet-based content in tweets and such.

moneytide1 6y ago

I wondered the same thing. It's the exact same service that just changes hands every few years under a new brand. In grade school before the internet, this occurred through physical products. My first grade trend was Yo Yo (Yomega, Brainstorm, Duncan), second grade Pokemon trading cards (Digimon, Magic, Yu Gi Oh), third grade finger skateboards (TechDeck), fourth and fifth segways into middle school when social systems are developing so its clothes brand trend pursuit which is when I checked out because video games were starting to get interesting. Phones and Xanga/Myspace arrived roundabout when I got my driver's license. I'm sure there were similar toy brand trends pre-covid when kids were still seeing each other every day and sharing physical toys. TikTok released some official report the other day in compliance with whatever legal motions were recently filed, and it keeps saying the word "clusters" when referring to users. I guess it's just yet another company that wants to compete over access to "clusters" of users aged 12-35 (that's the widest age range I would expect to be concerned with the latest communication app offering that enables the exact same utility they already had with Vine/Snap/Tik).

grenoire 6y ago

Not-really-affiliated-but-kind-of Byte (https://byte.co/ https://byte.co/) totally failed with its launch, such a shame.

zedpoeticbits 6y ago
It has failed? How so? I checked them out when they first launched and they seemed to be doing pretty great. What happened?
untog 6y ago
I have Byte and browse it every now and then. Maybe it failed if the only metric of success is hockey stick growth, but when I open it I see an active community. If it does well enough to be self-sustainable then I consider that a success. Not everything has to be Silicon Valley level stratospheric.

bzb5 6y ago

Mark Zuckerberg: “Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”

tyingq 6y ago
The irony is heavy.
- pletsch 6y ago
  Facebook isn't a mess business-wise, they print money
  - adventured 6y ago
    Not only has Facebook always run their business in a vastly superior way in terms of cost in the system, they never went through something equivalent to the fail whale mess that plagued Twitter. Facebook's performance problems have been minor compared to what Twitter has gone through. As a business, Twitter should be far more profitable than they are, their profit margin is 1/3 that of Facebook at the same level of sales (2011 for Facebook), despite having 1/2 the number of users that Facebook had at that point time.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I was referring more generally to how they print money (gold mine) despite, or maybe because of, a user and privacy hostile experience (clown car).

cowmix 6y ago

Thank you! When my kids tried to explain TikTok to me I responded, "So it is Vine?"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tyingq 6y ago

My kids still watch Vine compilations on YouTube, and they are mystified as to why it was shut down.

jug 6y ago
There were even celebrities using it to make funny videos. They had good timing and foresaw where social media was going. Baffling how they couldn’t monetize it.

xwdv 6y ago

I don’t know why people say this. Vine was nothing like TikTok. The editing tools of TikTok are vastly superior and lead to much higher quality videos with higher probability of being worth watching. Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Good for some laughs, but ultimately vapid and shallow. By the time they even wanted to experiment with longer format content they were done. That’s not even mentioning cultural differences.

ForHackernews 6y ago
> Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Isn't this what Tiktok is? I thought it was mostly tweens dancing and lip syncing.
- untog 6y ago
  They can both be summed up as "meme like content" but beyond that they're really very different. I'm not sure why the OP is being downvoted, really.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Try actually using TikTok. For more than a few minutes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - silveroriole 6y ago
    I tried it. The majority of videos for a new user account came up as either incredibly inappropriate videos of tweens or incredibly racist videos of tweens (seriously, I was surprised at how many racist/pedophile jokes came up). Maybe if you curate your liked videos you can get out of that, but I genuinely felt uncomfortable using it as a 30yo.
    - xwdv 6y ago
      I have no problem consistently getting older TikTokkers. I like their content and the algos oblige.

pjc50 6y ago

The lead Viners demanded to be paid while Twitter completely failed to monetise it. https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t...

colejohnson66 6y ago
I can’t really feel bad for the Viners. I sympathize with the idea that Twitter is/was mooching off free content, but at the same time: One should never make content with the expectation of getting paid, and then post on a free website that doesn’t pay anyone.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  The thing with tiktok, it’s really easy for content creators to insert links to their websites, merch, other social medias into videos so it allows them to make some money from interested users.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    Whereas US-centric apps like Instagram do everything possible to prevent users from leaving the walled garden. "Link in bio" is commonplace for numerous accounts. User-hostile and completely antithetical to the idea of an interlinked web.
    - rimunroe 6y ago
      I've never seen more than one link in a person's profile on TikTok, and "link in profile" is still a common phrase on there.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Vine was delightful. A lot of funny stuff on it all the time. I think Twitter was incompetent when trying to make it a business. It’s the Minecraft effect. Just because a person or organization hits it huge once doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing and will be able to repeat success.

vxNsr 6y ago

Twitter couldn’t figure out a monetization strategy. Also the main reason tiktok grew so popular is bec of their algo, good algos is something twitter sucks at. Finally the idea of using an algo to surface content the way tiktok is doing is actually novel and wasn’t really apparent 5 years ago.

apahwa 6y ago
I think I'm missing something. why was it novel to use an algo to surface content 5 years ago? Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc have both been doing that for a very long time is there something unique about how tiktok is doing it?

dghughes 6y ago

I'd say that is the business model Tik Tok "WTF happened to Vine"? Vine was popular but not exploited (for lack of a better term) so Tik Tok picked up where Vine left off.

sassycassie 6y ago

BRING BACK VINE