Vine… What the hell happened?

Vine. The six-second (actually 6.4 second) looping video platform owned by Twitter. 200 Million active users each month. Billions of views every day. BILLIONS. EVERY. DAY.

Vine is dead.

What the hell happened?

You just have look at the recent posts of some of Vine’s top content creators since the bad news dropped that the app is no more. The app, for many, changed their lives. It certainly changed our family’s lives.

Back in 2013 I was doing voiceovers pretty much full-time. A great gig for sure but it wasn’t paying a lot. We were struggling financially. A few years earlier our tech company had been hacked. We lost hundreds of thousands of dollars… and had the tax bill the next year to prove it.

I wasn’t smiling much in those days. We came dangerously close to losing everything… and I mean, everything.

The dark fog of every day got to a point where I was desperate to just laugh again. I’d watch outtakes from TV shows and films on YouTube and be so jealous of how they were always laughing.

Then one epiphanous day, Gregor (our youngest son) showed me a new app he’d seen Ty Moss vlog about earlier that day. It was called Vine. It was owned by Twitter and it was like the video version of a Tweet.

Short. Succinct.

The super restrictive time parameter of six-seconds acted like an art filter.

Get rid of the fluff.
Get rid of the distraction.
Get rid of everything except for the message… the punch… the feeling.

The beauty of Vine was that it seemed to capture raw emotions and loop them.

Funny. Sad. Thoughtful. Mesmerizing.

I was hooked.

I messed around and created the usual crappy content that new users create (that’s the beauty of creativity… you have to create crappy stuff first and just learn from it to get to the good stuff).

Then in August 2013, I created ‘Put Your Finger On The Screen’. It gave the illusion that the viewer was interacting with the recorded video.

It went viral. Over 150K views in less than 12 hours.

It was panic stations in our house. After years of wading through the mess of our previous misfortune, here was a shooting star. We knew what opportunity looked like. To paraphrase what Thomas Edison (the thieving bastard that he was) once said, most people don’t recognize opportunity because it arrives at your door wearing dungarees and looking a lot like hard work.

We were ready to work.

We created as much as we could. Learning from microscopic successes and failures. My numbers started to grow. Really grow. Within in a month we had our first gig with Disney and off we went to California.

Since 2013 I’ve created over one thousand Vines. About 10% of them have been for brands… and it’s been enough to keep our family of four afloat.

So, what the hell happened?

I’m not privy to the inside decision making at Twitter. Though I’d, without hesitation, tell you that almost every single person I’ve met from Twitter or Vine has been smart. A couple of them whip smart.

They all had amazing ideas for the future of Vine. This digital equivalent to the Comics page in a newspaper.

So, what the hell happened?

Based on my chats with various people, the problem seems to be ingrained in the Twitter environment. It’s a middle management purgatory where everyone is told to stay in their lane and mind their own business.

Great ideas for small changes to Vine that should have taken days to implement would take several months… if they happened at all.

Apps like Musical.ly and SnapChat were lapping Vine with little effort. Trying changes and upgrades. Removing the ones that didn’t work. Making the ones that did work better.

You know, being creative.

Vine was still awesome, but it was becoming clear that it was being run poorly. Decision by committee style. A committee where it was safer (for the time being) to just keep everything the way it is.

Again, individually, most of the Twitter and Vine staff I’ve met had nothing but the best ideas for Vine, but those ideas were disregarded or even stomped on by a seemingly paranoid and terrified decision-making environment.

Am I sad that Vine is gone? Yes. Unequivocally, yes.

I was one of the faithful who didn’t abandon it for YouTube when I first tasted success.
I purposely didn’t spam my feed with ads for my other platforms.
It felt disrespectful.

In hindsight, maybe I should have. The Twitter machine (again, not the individuals I know), doesn’t seem to have much regard for their content creators… so why should the content creators care about it?

Will that ever change? Gosh, I hope so.

Thankfully, my audience has moved to find me on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The numbers are smaller (for now) but I’m still creating content. Still laughing every day.

Vine gave me my smile back. I will be forever grateful for that.

Do it for the Vine, indeed.