How Vine shifted internet culture
Vine had a significant impact on culture and opened the door for other social media platforms to mimic the short-form Vine-style video content. Vine creators Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll introduced Vine in 2012, and some Vine users found fame in funny, sentimental, and always relatable videos going viral. Although the creators of Vine sold the app to Twitter, and Twitter later announced it would shut down Vine in 2016, the short iconic videos live on with compilation videos on Youtube. I chose to research and write about Vine because I never joined the app, but I am familiar with many iconic Vines that I still love today. My favorite, “Look at all those chickens!” The power of viral Vines reaches people who were not on the popular app, and it makes a great topic to dive into on Medium. My friends and family introduced me to famous Vines, and now if I need to laugh, I watch them on Youtube.
Rolling Stone wrote an article in 2016 about the “8 Reasons Why Vine Mattered.” One thing that sticks out to me the most about Vine is how it opened the door for young creatives to build an online community, business, or entertainment career. Rolling Stone’s article summarizes this best. They mentioned how Vine recognized black creators like Peaches Monroee who coined the term “on fleek.” Monroee started a business, made the term official, and capitalized on the viral moment. Although, as an important side note of viral social media trends, in an interview with BET she mentions that everyone did not give her credit for the term. An issue we see on TikTok where Black creators are not credited for starting trends and influencing culture.
Another reason why Vine was popular was because it allowed users to discover new artists and new music. Dance challenges took off, and new comedy and comedy stars found fame. Also, Youtubers had another option for their career path, and celebrities had a way to show their humor and behind-the-scenes content.
In a 2020 CNN Business article, Yusupov says Vine did not continue to innovate in the way we say apps like TikTok continue to evolve, which eventually led to Twitter shutting down Vine. “Though many tech founders innovate by riffing on existing themes, some introduce new foundational ideas to the market. These are things like the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, Snapchat stories and Mindie’s slow-mo capture tools for creating lip-sync videos. At Vine, we were lucky to have a few: including touch-and-hold for recording clips and auto-playing videos in feeds. The challenge is to take those foundational ideas and build on them. They can’t become static accomplishments. They need to become building blocks toward new innovation,” Yusupov wrote.
Interestingly, shortly after Vine was gone, the creators of Vine released Hype. The Hype app is not familiar to me. TechCrunch wrote about the news in 2016, stating the app was for users to interact with each other’s live-streamed videos. The creators also made Vine Camera, which only allowed the creation of 6-second videos to be saved on your phone or published to Twitter. Vine users reportedly had until January 17, 2017, to save their content before it disappeared along with the app.
In China, other companies released similar apps like TikTok. According to CNBC, “TikTok was released in 2017 by China-based company ByteDance, which makes a Chinese version of the app called Douyin.” The TikTok app allows users to lip-sync, participate in viral dance challenges, promote their business, or raise awareness of social issues. The app gained traction in the United Stated with Generation Z (Gen Z) and later in 2020 became a staple for all generations due to quarantining at home during the pandemic. Like Vine, users who have a video go viral will gain popularity and sometimes capitalize on the viral moment to build an online community, business, or entertainment career.
Now we have Byte, which is another app that seems inspired by Vine. The New York Times featured an article in 2020 that highlighted the similarities between the former app and Byte. The article mentions Byte has an edge against TikTok in the potential to pay creators. One former Vine viral creator, Eric Dunn, says he has a modest following on TikTok. Dunn moved his content to Instagram instead of Youtube like most Vine stars did. Dunn hopes to capitalize on Byte with Vine-like content. In the article, The New York Times interviewed another Vine user and shared the following quote. “People just forgot about Vine and moved to TikTok,” said Messiah D. Agurs, who was a child (7 years old) when he joined Vine and is now 13.”
Before Twitter shut down Vine, they struggled to figure out how to incentivize and pay Vine stars. As mentioned earlier by one of Vine’s creators, this is one of the reasons Vine failed to be innovative. Later in 2020, we see social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok pay creators for going live on the platforms. The Instagram Badges allows payments to come from users purchasing badges for the creator they follow. Bustle reports TikTok launched the Creator Fund Program, which promises to pay TikTokers who meet the program’s criteria for posting videos on the app. In 2021, TikTok announced the ability for users to purchase virtual gifts to give to influencers during live streams.
It is clear that Vine changed the path of the internet and meme culture, and the social media platforms that followed have used the Vine app as inspiration. We will likely continue to see new social media apps launched with the same goals in mind and influencers moving to the next hottest app.
This post was written for the UF CJC Online Intro to Social Media graduate course.
