Vine, Twitter’s unorthodox six-second, mobile-only video app, is shutting down. Without giving a specific timeline, the company stated on Thursday that sometime “in the coming months” it will be discontinuing its video uploader but preserving, at least for now, the millions of videos that already exist on the website.
While this news might come as a shock to Vine’s loyal fans, industry insiders probably could have seen it coming. The platform reportedly had 200 million active users as recently as October 2015, with 30 million of those users in the US, but throughout 2016 various reports have said the site was in decline (along with Twitter itself).
The reasons for this decline are multifaceted — a mix of changing company goals, stagnating audience reach, and perhaps even the simple fact that Vine’s users have grown up faster than Vine itself. But Vine’s demise isn’t just a business lesson; it’s a cultural loss for all of us, and especially for the millions of black social media users who’ve spent the past four years making Vine into a much-needed, critically important safe space.
Vine’s outward inaccessibility and technological quirks made it a completely unique internet space
The most common comment about Vine from non-users seems to be, “I just don’t get Vine,” and there’s a very practical reason for that: Being a mobile-only app was one of Vine’s most defining features, and meant the service was closed off to many internet users loyal to their desktop and laptop devices. For many people, that put it in the category of “social media you’re too old to use.”
Vine launched in 2012, and for the first two years of its existence, you couldn’t even access it from a computer without having a Vine account. You could watch a Vine loop if it showed up somewhere else, like Twitter or Facebook, or in a YouTube compilation of Vines on a particular theme, but there was no way to navigate to Vine and just browse through a bunch of videos, the way you can with YouTube. If early viral Vine videos seemed to randomly appear in your various social media timelines without context or explanation, it was because they had been plucked from their natural habitat — the mobile side of the internet — and placed on your laptop.
Vine’s initial crop of users were theoretically the golden eggs of internet advertising: They were young and constantly mobile. Filming and editing a six-second video from their phones was an intuitive act for them, and meant they were able to quickly adapt to the site and create a unique culture largely generated by the novelty of the early Vine experience.
Vine was communal in the extreme. And since its community skewed heavily toward teen and preteen users, many of them black, it frequently looked like no other social media platform on the internet.
The site’s web platform didn’t even launch until 2014, and by then Vine had established, through its technological insularity, a unique and iconoclastic culture. And its insider-only community continued to keep outsiders at bay even as the site grew more accessible. The site’s informal society grew out of its relative newness and the shared collective experience of adjusting to the tricky requirements of pulling off a social media message in under six seconds.
Vine users frequently circulated call-and-response memes, remixed and remade other people’s Vine videos into ever-blossoming new memes and fusions with old memes, and constantly appeared in Vine videos with other Vine users — none of which would have made sense to someone not fairly well-versed in Vine culture to date. All of this meant that to outsiders, Vine frequently looked like a bunch of jerkily edited inside jokes with little substance.
But it was precisely Vine’s technological and cultural inaccessibility that made it a welcoming place for artists, comedians, and people looking for a greater degree of social media freedom.
Six seconds: the ideal length for the perfect joke, the perfect edit, the perfect prank, the perfect Vine
Creativity on Vine was limited only by how handy you were with your phone. But the most crucial technical factor was the six-second maximum length of Vine videos. (Technically, 6.4 seconds.)
When launching the site, Twitter noted that Vine’s developers had “found that 6 seconds was the ideal length, from both the production and consumption side." And in truth, Vine users collectively responded with, “Challenge accepted.” Or, more accurately, with the community’s unofficial anthem, “Do it for the Vine.”
It turns out that you can actually accomplish a lot in six seconds — like setting up a succinct, infinitely loop-able joke, as in the famous “Duck Army” vine. The musical side of Vine often used the six-second limit to do really cool things structurally, musically and collectively:
Artists, animators, and illustrators used Vine’s GIF-like qualities and short loops to produce mesmerizing digital art:
And for video editors, the possibilities were even greater:
Editing reigned on Vine, particularly in the form of quick musical or pop culture mashups and fusions of pre-existing videos and memes.
This one, for example, grew so popular it spilled over into real life: a Vine meme involving an impromptu chorus to a Fifth Harmony song became a real fan chant during live Fifth Harmony concerts.
Vine was probably most friendly toward comedians, whether part of a troupe or flying solo. Because the six-second format required a lot of organization to successfully set up a joke and deliver, the format made its users into sharp and savvy performers.
The best vines seemed to combine all of the elements listed above — editing, music, comedy — to make entertainment magic:
Sure, Vine gave the world what seemed to be an endless coterie of shaggy-haired, white teenage boys who were all friends and seemed to be vaguely famous for being famous. (In fact, most of them emerged from Vine’s rampant prank culture.)
Among the best known were Nash Grier and Cameron Dallas, who eventually vied for greater fame with the 2015 direct-to-iTunes movie The Outfield but who have otherwise found success in just being themselves. They’re flocked by fans wherever they go, with high-profile Hollywood ties; it’s hard not to see them as the face of Vine — pretty but vapid, and tied to homophobia, racism, and sexism.
But Vine has also given the world talented musicians like Rudy Mancuso, incredible digital artists like Alicia Herber and Zach King, self-aware comedians like King Bach, and performance artists like Will Sasso, all of whom have thrived on the six-second looping medium and made it their own. And for every fame-hungry MagCon attendee, there were thousands of teens and tweens simply being creative and expressing themselves, like “On fleek” inventor Peaches Monroee or wry bully thwarter Brandon Bowen.
Even as Vine retained its insularity, it constantly influenced the wider sphere of pop culture. Ryan McHenry’s “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal” meme even caused the real Ryan Gosling to respond in tribute after McHenry’s untimely death last year.
Memes like “On fleek,” “Why you always lyin’,” “or nah,” and “Get out me car” have found special places in our hearts, even if you weren’t aware of their origins.
And most of them came from a specific side of Vine culture — its thriving and unique black community.
Vine was a safe, comforting place to be Black on the internet
Vine culture, as a general rule, was happy in a way that many other social media platforms weren’t. The usual extreme viewpoints still exist on Vine, of course. But because it was primarily a collective community experience, and because six-second videos were hardly an ideal format for either serious conversation or anonymous trolling, the ongoing harassment-fueled culture war that has severely divided other social media sites was nowhere to be found. Vine was a place that would cheer you up.
While many of the best Vine users were performers, Vine itself was a more informal space than YouTube or Twitter or Instagram. Because it was more insular, it was easier for users to feel they were among friends. To a huge degree, Vine’s cultural emphasis on community and positivity was fostered and built by its large black user base.
Reacting to the shutdown of Vine on Medium, writer Bridget Todd spoke of the familiar comfort afforded her from this famous “Mr. Postman” Vine.
Todd spoke of how important this Vine was as solace to her in the middle of a turbulent period for the black community, and how it represented the culture of Vine as a whole:
Last summer, when I felt like if I watched one more video of a police shooting I’d lose it, I turned to Vine for solace.
I watched one so many times I can recall it from memory. A handful of Black tweens are playing around and singing the Marvelette’s 1961 classic “Mr. Postman” to their letter carrier. The kids are having fun — they all have big cheesy grins on their faces. Wherever they are looks safe, clean, and cared for. The letter carrier, also Black, is pleased to see them and reacts like he sees these same kids enough to know them all by name.
To me, something about this video came to represent an idyllic slice of Black life, where it’s okay for Black kids to just goof around and be kids. After a summer of Trayvon, Mike, and Tamir, I needed this and Vine delivered.
Vine has been criticized for reinforcing racial stereotypes due to its minimalist nature, drawing frequent comparisons to 19th-century minstrel shows. But these comparisons overlook the ways in which Vine has served as a much-needed way for communities of color to mock and respond to stereotypes about themselves, while safely expressing anxiety about police violence, racism, and other threats to black lives. Black Vine is, if anything, willing to turn its blunt-edged social commentary inward on itself, often using hyperbolic stereotypes to challenge and dismantle the idea of stereotyping altogether.
The two Vines above are the work of Andrew Bachelor, a.k.a. the aforementioned self-aware comedian King Bach. Bachelor is the most popular user on Vine, with 16 million followers. That he is also a black man who grew his following organically on the platform speaks to Vine’s uniqueness as a social media space.
But Bachelor is by no means alone. Vine has fostered emerging black voices like “King” Keraun Harris, who jump-started his career as a comedian after a stint in prison by making Vine videos. Harris and his frequent performance partner Simone Shepherd praise the platform for giving black artists and performers a way to be heard outside of a traditional entertainment industry that perpetually struggles to diversify.
Vine often functions as a nexus of black culture and black experience, which makes sense because Vine is what every other social media platform would look like if users of color were able to openly tell their own stories in their own way without fearing harassment or backlash. As the Guardian’s Hannah Giorgis notes, many Vine users are sharing uniquely black and African diaspora cultural experiences without bothering to translate them for a perceived white audience.
Vine also played a huge role in documenting the social unrest and protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. For an example, see Antonio French’s recently released Ferguson, a short documentary compilation of the Vines and Twitter videos French made during the Ferguson protests.
With Vine shutting down, the black community really has no similar space to turn to that offers this level of free expression through artistry and performance. Though most of Vine’s top stars have already been gradually moving on to YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat (more on that below), it’s possible Vine’s uniqueness both as a platform and as a community means that voices will fade out in the transition from Vine to other social media spaces.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Vine was probably never long for this world.
Vine wasn’t sustainable either for its users or for advertisers
Vine didn’t run platform-wide ads the way many other social networks do; instead, it relied heavily on brand partnerships between businesses and social media stars, which Vine profited from through its role as middleman and liaison. Without a more traditional advertising model, Vine was heavily dependent on its community of social media “heavy lifters” — the many “Vine stars” who made the platform their own and wound up commanding millions of followers and advertiser interest.
Vine’s parent company, Twitter, knew this; Twitter acknowledged the significance of Vine’s celebrities as recently as July, when it stated to Recode, “Vine is an important part of our strategy, particularly given its vibrant community of creators.”
But the very insular culture of Vine that helped make these stars famous within the community also meant that staying on Vine couldn’t propel those stars into greater prominence. So they started leaving the site in droves. And when they left, so did all the lucrative brand partnerships from which Vine drew revenue.
As a way to staunch the flood of Viners moving to YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, Vine finally expanded the length of its videos in June, and produced its first longform series replete with Vine stars. But by then it was too late to change the fundamentals of Vine culture.
Ultimately, Vine was less a cultural melting pot and more a kind of cultural Breakfast Club: a place where artists hung out with meme makers, who hung out with unruly teen pranksters, who hung out with musicians and comedians and families using Vine for personal reasons. Sure, they may have been brought together through hashtags and a collective love of perfect six-second looping edits, but at the end of the day, the artist can work on any platform while the prankster just wants to join a YouTube network, and the family can use any number of video services. Vine’s ragtag, unexpected found community will scatter, but we can thank the site for giving us one glorious moment (or four years) where so many people came together for six seconds of magic.