Vine is dead. It is now exists as a glorious smattering of Vine Comps on YouTube, a digital time capsule refracting the memes, digital sensibilities and the very special way Vine content was crafted between 2013 and 2016.
Vine was a special oddball within the social media landscape. It spurred us to do the most and the be the most — #doitforthevine. It was the perfect outlet for our jumpy, hyped up attention span: 7 seconds, hit me. In 7 seconds, creators grabbed us with the weirdest, wildest, most outlandish and unexpected content. It had the feeling of being raw media while also, often, being meticulously shot and re-shot until all 7 seconds flow liked gold. Twitter bought Vine for a reported $30 million in 2012 before it even went live. But they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it, to hack dollars out of our creations, to inject it with gross advertising and sponsored content. So now Vine is dead.
Gabbie Hanna, who shared her Vine videos with 4.9 million follows, eulogized the Vine death via Twitter: “Vine being deleted is like an old friend i havent rly talked to in a while dying & even tho we werent close anymore it hurts to see them go.”
Vine was a platform for creative, unexpected content — a place for creators to experiment outside of the commercialized bubble of YouTube or platforms heavily tied to your identity, like Snapchat and Instagram. With Vine, we could effectively become performance artists, where the social and cultural capital wasn’t tied to normative social performances (which it is, on basically, like, every other platform #normies).
In class, we spent time discussing how social media reacts when a person dies — the Facebook memorials, the popularity-ranked HeavenAddress pages. But here we can see what happens when a platform dies: we won’t be able to experience Vines like kids in 2014 got to experience Vines. But the content still circulates in YouTube compilations. The ghost of Vine — incomplete and inexact but still enough — lives on, for now.