Version History: Vine

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I promise someday I will stop begging you to do this, but today is not that day. Enjoy the show. See you next time. It's 2012 and Twitter is at the red hot center of culture. We had an election in 2012. Obama won again. There was an Olympics in 2012. Hurricane Sandy happened in 2012. And all of those things had one important thing in common, which is that everybody wanted to tweet about them all day, every day.

But Twitter also just bought an app that might turn out to be even more important. It's called Vine, and it lets you make and share videos six seconds at a time. They loop forever, and they're going to change the way people think about content. From the Virgin Box Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today we are talking about six seconds at a time, why Vine mattered, and why it died. Stay tuned.

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All right, we're back. Let's talk Vine. We have a crew here to talk Vine. Sarah Zhang is here. Hi, Sarah. Hi. Mia Sato is here. Hello. And Marina Galparina is here. Hi. Hello. This is, I would say, this was a hotly contested episode that everyone wanted to be on. It turns out everybody has like really strong feelings about Vine, which I'm very excited about. You all have like real Vine credentials, but Marina, you in particular, just casually dropped when I was like, we're doing a thing about Vine. You were like, oh, I did a gallery show of Vines. Explain this to me. Yeah, this was like 2013 and Postmaster's Gallery invited me and Kyle Chaiga to co-curate a show of...

something. And we're like, okay, we're going to show Vines. And at the time, and I told you this, this was the best version of Vine, you could not upload a pre-edited video. You had to record live. So we had some developers do a backend that you could do that. And that's how we sold a Vine.

For $200. But we had $14. You made more money than most Viners. This was at the Moving Image Fair. So it was like a big deal for us. But yeah, it was. In 2013, you were like early to it too. That was a cool kid Vine era. Yeah. I love this. The golden year. Mia, Sarah, were you guys Viners? Like we sort of covered this journalistically, but were you like Vine people?

I was on Vine. I remember one of the first brushes with like, it wasn't even virality, but the feeling of putting something on the internet and people other than your friends seeing it. I made a Vine where I was like at my local Target and I was in the magazine aisle, which I don't even know if that exists anymore. But there were like, you know, People Magazine and the news magazines. And I took a stack of special like teeny bop One Direction themed magazines where the whole issue was One Direction. And I made a Vine where I was just putting the One Direction magazines in front of all the news. And it got like, yeah, because I was obsessed with One Direction. And it got like a couple dozen likes. And I was like.

this is crazy. Like, this is so cool. Yeah, that's like, everybody has that first rush where you're like, I could be a star. Yeah. This is my calling. Yeah, like I existed in the internet, not just to my friends, but like to the general public. I also feel like putting One Direction magazines in front of other things is like a surprisingly good Vine bit that would have worked for a really long time. True. I wasn't thinking like hustle. You know what I mean? I was not rising and grinding. Yeah, I mean, that came later. Yeah. I understand. Sarah, what about you? Mostly I did like pop culture clips, right? So it's like, there'd be...

like some scene in Star Trek where they're fighting off a virus and what they're talking about makes absolutely no sense. And then I'd like do a little clip just for my like cybersecurity pals. But like mostly I just watched Vines, right? I watched a lot of Vines. Yeah, they were great. I was trying to think back and I have I don't have memories of like sitting on Vine the way that I sit on TikTok. But then we were all going back through old Vines in preparation for this. And oh, my God, are there a million Vines that I remember?

beyond things that I even remember being Vines, they were just, they're just like things in the world now that I was like, I must've spent way more time on Vine than I realized in those years. Really in like that year that it turned out to be. Yeah. I don't remember sitting there watching Vines, but yes, as we were going through it, I was like, I must've seen so many Vines. Like I must've spent a lot of time on this platform, even though I have no memory of sitting there spending time on this platform. Yeah. Which is weird given what we're about to talk about with the disaster that was this platform, that any of that is still true is kind of wild. So we're going to do this kind of in two pieces because I think there's the like,

the Vine story as a company and as a product that is actually pretty short and pretty messy and pretty straightforward. So we're going to talk through that a little bit. And then we asked you guys to just bring some Vines that you thought were cool or important that we want to talk about. And I think, frankly, that is the best way to talk about Vine is through the Vines and not through the company and the product, which is, as we're about to find out, mostly just a disaster. So the story starts in 2012, which is earlier than I thought, actually. This feels like we're doing the vertical looping video thing. This all feels very recent. But 2012 is kind of a long time ago. Companies founded.

Three co-founders, Russ Yusupov, Don Hoffman, and Colin Kroll. Their original plan, which is I don't think a thing I knew before, was basically like what if Twitter but video. One of the reasons they landed on making it so short and so straightforward and so simple was they just like wanted it to be a casual way to share stuff. Like Jack Dorsey's whole like I just want to do status updates thing. That was the original Vine plan, which I thought was sort of fascinating, which also sort of explains why Twitter would have just instantly bought this company. They hadn't launched. They had no, I don't even know how Twitter like came to be aware of Vine, but they found the company in 2012 and they sell to Twitter in 2012 for $30 million, which is sick.

And that is my new app plan is make an app, don't launch it, sell it for a lot of money and just dip. So kudos. So all this happens. The app launches January 24th, 2013. And by April, it had 200 million users. This thing just like exploded. It's thing. Well, actually, we should talk about this. There were a bunch of things that like sort of made Vine Vine, a bunch of different like constraints. One of them was the six seconds. They only let you make six second videos. One of them was the loop. And one of them at the very beginning was that you couldn't edit or shoot in other apps. Like you were saying, Rani, you like had to basically shoot the thing once and upload the thing that you shot. You could pause.

It was like a touch and go thing. Yeah, wait, can you describe actually how this worked? I have no memory of making early Vines. I think you held the digital button and it would record, and then when you stopped, it would stop recording. So then you set up for your next shot and record it again. So it was very like Jonas Mekes, who's a avant-garde filmmaker who shot these things on Super 8, I always remember.

over the course of years, it would be short clips. So I did that over the course of my day. Maybe I pioneered the get ready with me. I don't know. I think you did. I think we're giving that to you officially for sure. The only thing I remember about the interface at the very beginning was like there was no record button or anything. It was like the whole, you pressed anywhere on the screen, right? And it would take a video. That's very clever. So I have a clip from 2013 of two of the founders talking about why they picked the time. But then I want to know if y'all think the time is actually the thing that made Vine Vine because I've come to think that maybe it's not. Let me just play the clip for you. So one of the questions that we get all the time is why is it six seconds?

And there actually isn't like a great answer to why it's six seconds. Please don't answer that question. So we started at five seconds and we went all the way up to 10. And what we found was that like the quality of the video didn't really change at all, but it became a real pain in the butt to watch a 10 second video. It was hard to upload to. So we went back down to five, but a lot of people were saying like, this isn't enough time. I can't like capture what I want. And what we realized was it wasn't an issue of the length per se. It was an issue of people having a really hard time gauging.

what they had left based on just the progress bar. So what we did was we had the progress bar represent six seconds, but we let you shoot past the six seconds up to 6.5. And as soon as we did that, the quality of that last cut on these videos people were making went up like 10 times. It was so much better. So my thing is, I watched this clip and immediately I'm like, oh, they had no idea what they were doing. There's no plan anywhere in that. Sounds like a lot of bullshit. But yeah, so they land on, I guess, six and a half seconds, which I had never heard before. Good hack, six and a half seconds. But to me, looking back, I kind of feel like...

The thing where the video just kept looping was as important to what made Vine Vine as the six seconds. Yeah, because you would watch things, watch for different things every time you watched it. And it felt sort of endless and way more detailed the second time around and then the third time around of watching it. And I feel it's interesting, like so many of these things that are very used now in TikTok feel very Vine related. Like the way that, you know, I think in TikTok, a lot of things like end on a place right before the beginning. And so it kind of encourages you to keep watching it. And Vine did that.

in a very organic way. I think because it was so short and people were cramming so much stuff into that brief moment of time. Yeah, I think that was when I remember first seeing all the comments about like praising the perfect loop. Everybody was like looking for the thing where you can't even tell where the video ends and begins. It just kind of goes forever. I was like, I still see those every once in a while. They're like trying to nail the perfect viney loop. And the very end had to be slightly cut off. And that's something you see on TikTok now. Totally. Just like...

Maybe it should have been seven seconds. I don't know. Right. Like the every end is like slightly cut off and every beginning is slightly cut off. Like the end of the millennial pause, right? It's like it begins on Vine. It also sort of rewards like the best thing about the very good YouTube videos early on, right? When you see a very good YouTube video, like the super early ones that are like a couple minutes long, you always want to play it again. Right. And it's like the fact that Vine automatically loops it, like it creates that incentive, I guess, to make something that's very watchable again, again, again. Yeah. And it feels like when it's six seconds at a time.

all of the like view numbers turn out to be lies. Because everybody watches everything a hundred times by accident. Like I've had this experience so many times recently on TikTok where I'll like start a TikTok and then I put my phone down while it's playing and then I come back a minute later and I've watched this video 10 times. And it's like, well, you're welcome, I guess, for all of the view juicing I'm doing for you. So anyway, so this all takes off. And I think pretty quickly it started to get like a little more sophisticated. A thing that I had forgotten about was that at the beginning you couldn't use your front facing camera on Vine. And that one of the big things they did was just turn that on for people because it like, it sort of makes sense, I guess. Like if you're...

If your idea is just like let people take pictures of the world that they're in to share them, you have the back camera. But all anybody wants to do is take videos of themselves. And so making that turn very important and like really like you can see the inflection point in Vine when all of a sudden you could turn the camera on yourself as you're recording. Also, a thing that I had forgotten was how quickly everybody else started doing Vine. Like Instagram puts video into Instagram in 2013. Snapchat stories 2013. It's like Vine hits big, really fast. And all of a sudden, everybody else just copies Vine and puts it into their platform. And Twitter.

there's probably a nicer way to say this, but Twitter at this time was like a badly run company full of bad executives who didn't know how to run companies. And Vine is like doing well sort of despite itself. But even internally, there's a sense of like, we don't have a plan. We don't know what we're doing. Nobody's making any money. We're like culturally very important and all of this is a mess. And Vine was like right dead center of that. And I feel like this was also like peak Twitter in terms of like how important it was in the world. This was, it was, it was everywhere. This was, I think like the Sully Sullenberger era of like news was happening. All of this, like Twitter was the center of everything in so many ways.

but didn't know how to make enough money to like rub two nickels together. So all this keeps happening, keeps growing, everything's going fine. And then in mid 2015 is when stuff starts to get kind of wild. So this time there's this big group of Viners who all live together. This story is really like, it's both like very cool and kind of annoying. Like a bunch of Viners all moved to LA because they all wanted to get famous and get rich and be in Hollywood movies. And this was back like very much in the era where the goal was get famous on the internet and then go on television. And that is like...

This is sort of the end of that dream where like now I don't think most creators are spending a lot of time thinking like, how do I get an NBC pilot? But they were then. And so all these folks were going to move to L.A. and have like traditional Hollywood careers. And they all move into this one apartment complex at 1600 Vine in L.A. And a bunch of them have described it as like the replacement for their college experience. Sounds like a nightmare. Like an absolute nightmare. Every time I read this, I'm like, no, you should have gone to college. It's crazy. I know. Reading the like dispatches from, I guess, this proto hype house, I was like it.

sounds horrible yes like imagine being their neighbors i would lose my mind awful yeah it did remind me of all of the stories there was a run in like kind of throughout this whole phase where one delightful la news story was like logan paul threw a party and all of his neighbors were pissed off about it was like this would just come up over and over and i love i love those stories i miss them very much um but anyway so this group gets together and it's they become like the sort of cartel at the top of vine uh and a thing that i think was important about vine was there was no algorithm there was just your feed of who you followed and then there was the popular page uh I like deliberately never spent time on the popular page. I think because by the time I got to Vine, it was all of these people on the popular page. And like King Batch was never my vibe. Really? I don't know about y'all. No shade if you love King Batch back in the day, but not for me. But anyway, so these folks, there's like 20 of them living in this complex at one point. And they all basically come together and figure out that if they work together, they can own Vine. And so they start re-Vining each other to sort of artificially manufacture popularity for everybody else. They are making all these videos together and they tag each other. And there comes this like...

big heated debate over who gets tagged first in a video versus who gets tagged second. This stuff is like, again, waking nightmare of like being a person on the internet. But this is what they figure out. And so they're like, they're at a point where if you get the 10 most popular people on Vine together, they can control everything because there's no algorithm because Vine itself has no mechanism to be like, well, no, we're going to show you new stuff anyway. They could just flood the system. They were all over the popular page. And as it turns out, they were also making a lot of like, I don't know, really like sophomoric is probably the nicest way I can put it. It was a lot of like really like crass.

Yeah. Sexist, awful, lowbrow comedy stuff. Yeah. It was like the biggest stuff on Vine at this point. Yeah. I have no memory of like watching that kind of content. I guess probably because I didn't follow them and my friends, like a lot of the way that I found Vines were word of mouth. A friend being like, did you see this thing? And then they show it to me after school or something. But it was really weird to go back and see that the pervasive culture.

I guess just for the general population was this stuff that just objectively sucks really bad. It's not good. No, it's rough. And there's a lot of really just straightforwardly objectionable stuff that was at the very top of Vine for a really long time. And that's not a Vine-specific thing. That remains true everywhere on the internet. But it was so centralized at the top of Vine because these people were like, okay, if we re-Vine each other, if we promote each other all the time, we can make sure that all anybody sees is the 20 of us that live in this one apartment complex together. So they get very big. They keep getting bigger. They're growing and growing and growing. And it turns out Vine hates this.

They hate it. They hate it for a lot of reasons. One is because they feel like their platform has been sort of usurped by a bunch of people who are, A, making stuff that the Vine executives don't like. The people who worked at Twitter and all of this stuff were not trying to make a thing that was for these people to make horrible lowbrow comedy, and that's all anybody ever saw. So the Vine executives start doing things like blocking stuff from the popular page that should have been on there. This becomes this whole conspiracy theory that's going on, and people who work there have since confirmed that they were manually curating this page.

But this is like a story as old as the internet. Like, I don't know if any of y'all remember Dig, but like back in the Dig days, people would get really pissed because they'd be like, oh, my thing has a lot of Digs, but it's not on the popular page. And this thing with less Digs is on the popular page. And they'd like spin out about it on the internet. This becomes a huge thing on Vine. And again, it's the people who are the maddest about this are the most popular people on the platform. So this like becomes a huge, giant mess. And also Vine, again, because Twitter was a bad company run by people who didn't know how to run companies, just didn't take care of its creators at all. Like there was no sense that like we need a system to help the people who are making stuff for our platform.

part of me is like okay it was early this was early in the creator days but part of me is also like hey this is very obviously a thing you should do and also at this point like youtube was already doing a very good job of taking care of creators and had rev share stuff going on and so it's vine i don't know that to me is like the biggest own goal of all of vine is just like somebody probably should have just like made a phone call to these people and been like hey we're here what do you need it's also like i don't know if doing that would have made vine more fun like because as i remember it vine felt like very very amateur in a delightful way at least the vine that i was on and the people i guess were this cartel of I think mostly men, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but they were sort of aspiring towards something else that, at least for me, that never represented Vine. Like the production value for some of these, like the King Batch videos and stuff, I was like, who watched this? Was it like 10-year-olds? I don't know. I think the answer is always 10-year-olds. Yeah, that's true. On every platform everywhere, it's usually 10-year-olds. Very true. But it's like, I don't know if any of the people who made my favorite Vines that I still laugh at would have even wanted that sort of like creator path. I don't know. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's a weird, I don't know, did y'all have this perception too that there was like...

I feel like Vine, more than most, felt like it was sort of two completely different things. Because especially at the time it was really big, there was this group of, like, honest-to-God famous people, a lot of whom, you know, lived in this place in L.A. But then there was the rest of Vine, which felt, kind of like you're saying, completely different. It was like there were two totally separate platforms inside of Vine. Well, it was more like found art and less like an influencer. And because it was peer-to-peer, basically, like you said, they would send you recommendations. There was no algorithm showing you something. You stared in horror for three seconds forever now. It was more organic and it stayed in the circle of people that...

like that. And it was, it was kind of close to the original intent of like, let's capture moments in time from your day, but sometimes something brilliant would happen. And it was, yeah, that was my Vine. Yeah, that's the right Vine. It seems like that was also a time it was very like, it was important to have a couple of friends who were like pretty good at Vine. Because if you had somebody who was good at re-Vining stuff into your feed and also making their own stuff, like that was the sweet spot. All of my friends were trash at Vine. And so I had no one doing this job for me, which was maybe why I didn't get as much out of Vine as other people did. But anyway, so this house is going on.

It's growing. They're starting to fight with Vine more and more. And then at the end of 2015, this all comes to a head and a bunch of Vine people actually go to this apartment complex and they sit in a big conference room and they're like, okay, we're here. Let's all be friends. Let's talk it out. And Taylor Lorenz, who wrote a book about a lot of this, has a great chapter about all the Vine stuff. And one of the things she wrote is that a bunch of people in that room were basically using it as a therapy session. They just needed somebody to yell at about all of their feelings about Vine, which tracks. It's what it is to be an internet creator. It just made me think of all the people who make the why I'm mad at YouTube video now just to get the...

attention from somebody at YouTube. They're just like, I just want to know you're thinking about me, which is, you know, sure. Great. But they also wanted money. And this, this is the moment I would argue that Vine started to die. So what they demanded was this, it was a group of, I believe, 19 people who were sitting in this room and had like joined hands to make this fight together. And they wanted a million dollars a year to make three Vines a week. That was their pitch. And so the Vine people leave going, okay, a million dollars a year for the 19 top Viners to make three Vines a week, not a terrible deal. And then they go and they read the contract proposal and it's actually a million dollars per person.

per year to make three Vines a week. And again, I just cannot emphasize enough that Twitter didn't have any money and was not a good business. And so basically they were just like, well, no, we can't do that. We can't pay you directly to make content in this way, which to me is actually, there's such an interesting like alternate future that happens here if Vine says yes to this. Because ultimately like really $19 million a year for the most popular content on your platform, you could probably sit there and make a business case for it in a lot of ways if you're a very different company than Twitter was at the time.

But then one of the things they were worried about was that if they say yes to this, then all of the celebrities who are on Twitter who have big followings are going to start to be like, oh, pay me to tweet. And that if they had said yes to this, I think the reverberations out through the creator world would have just been insane. Yeah, this feels like an era, too, that was like a lot of people were purely doing it for the likes because there was nothing else to pay you in. And there was also no promise of like now I think people post for the likes for a while with the idea that eventually they can catapult it into getting brand deals or have ads placed on their content or whatever. But back then, I think there truly wasn't there. The currency was.

attention and the dopamine hit of like getting a heart or whatever um and so i don't know i still think it's like weird to think that that was such a novel idea of like paying your top creators to post exclusively or even non-exclusively on the platform to keep it alive but because now it feels like well duh um but back then it's like i don't know but even still like you look at what you know youtube does now and it's it's a it's not it's a more sort of straightforward business arrangement but it's not quite as simple as like i'm paying you to make three videos a week and if that was a if we had set that precedent ever you've got to figure anyone who is sufficiently popular shows up and is like, I would like mine. And it just changes the whole economics of this forever. Well, it changes the type of workers they are too, like period. Yeah, they become like Vine staff, essentially. Very highly paid Vine staff. Right, it's really weird. Yeah, and like this is also sort of, we're coming off of a period where all of these platforms had a very adversarial relationship with the content industry, right? They had a very adversarial relationship with the studios, with the record industry. Like it's just, it turns them into a different beast. Like totally. Yeah, like the idea of paying these people would have felt like anathema almost. Yeah, even though it...

probably would have saved Vine. It would have probably saved Vine. It would have also changed the internet forever. Yeah, it is. It's like that meeting is like so many different things could have happened after that meeting. But anyway, so Twitter says no. And then immediately all of the miners get really mad and spend months posting videos basically saying, follow us on other platforms. And at this point, like it was really Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were kind of the places to go. And people went and they told them to go. And I think more than not, all these folks ended up on YouTube. And YouTube had creator programs. It had revenue sharing programs. And it was like it had just professionalized in the way that Vine did not. And so all these people start to be like, we're out.

follow us on these other platforms, like angrily, loudly leaving Vine for months at a time. And again, they're very popular, so they can do things like make tons of people watch this. And so then the smaller creators see this and they start to say, oh, OK, well, we're going to leave too, because if it's not for them, it's not for us. And it's just like this thing just immediately starts to bleed. And meanwhile, Vine continues to like flail uncontrollably in every direction. At one point, it launched a Vine Kids app. That's crazy. I didn't know that. It already is Vine Kids. I have no other information for you other than that, but that's a thing that happened. At one point, you could post videos up to 140 seconds. But through all of this.

It's just too late. It's incredible. They did all of this without Elon Musk taking over. It's wild. It turns out you can run your own company into the ground without any help if you want to. And so for a while, Twitter starts thinking about bringing Vine more directly into Twitter. I think they had tried for a long time to run them as two separate things. I think you can actually debate whether that was the right or wrong call. But then as Vine starts to fall off, all of the people start to think about how do we merge these two things and turn Vine into Twitter video. Because at this point, again...

video is like ascendant everywhere on the internet. It's very clear this is where we're headed. Vine got a lot of things right. And there's a sense of like, okay, we're just going to move all this stuff together and it's going to work. But that didn't really come together and it pissed everybody off again because now everybody's like, oh, you don't even see this as its own platform. This is just a feature of Twitter. So it bleeds more users. This just keeps happening. Instagram gets better. YouTube gets better. Vine just continues to sort of collapse. And meanwhile, Twitter's business circa 2016, not great. Ironically, it got better after that because Trump got elected and there was this big spike in Twitter usage and like its relevance again, but tough times at this point. And so

October 27th of 2016, which is like a week before the election, which is sort of wild, Vine announced that it was shutting down, but that it was going to leave this thing called the Vine Archives open so that you couldn't make new Vines, but you could see old Vines. And then even the Vine Archives closed in 2019. And that is the whole story of Vine. It burned so insanely bright for so much less time than I realized. Like if you had been like, how long is Vine cool? I would have been like, I don't know, four or five years. It was like 18 months. Yeah, that's wild. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, to me, it's going back and being like, okay, the number of sort of...

almost correct ideas they had at the very beginning. They got most of it right. It's like the mobile video thing. We can make it easy to consume. We can make it easy to upload. We're going to give you more and more tools over time. We're going to make this a social thing. We're going to let people talk to each other. Revining was big and new and not something other platforms had. They got a lot of things right and just in classic Twitter fashion just couldn't make anything of it ever again.

I think none of that is actually Vine's true legacy, right? I think Vine's actual legacy is the people and the Vines. And so we're going to spend most of the rest of the show just talking about Vines. So let's quickly take a break and then we're going to come back and we're just going to play a lot of Vines. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So I think the best way to talk about why vine actually mattered in the world, again, it burned very bright, is just to play a bunch of vines. And so we asked all three of you to bring two vines that you think are great or important or just funny or memorable or whatever. And we're just going to sort of talk about why vine mattered through some vines. Does that sound good? That's great. All right, we're just going to go around the table here. Sarah, you're up first. Do you have any preamble for the first one you'd like to play here? Okay, this one is neither important nor, like, this one is memorable for me. This is, I think, emblematic of what...

Vine was in the sense that there's something that you saw and it just stuck in your head and it's there forever now. I will say there's something magical about the six seconds in that way. Like there's nothing else that feels that way to me now in that like the sort of short clip that you can like remember the whole thing of the second time you see it. Very powerful in a way that nothing replaces now. All right. So let's let's play this one. Here we go. It's just a woman dancing with her cat.

And it just loops forever. It feels so much longer than six seconds. There's like a world in here. It's a whole world. And the cat is really cute. And the music loops perfectly. It's very smooth. Yeah, you just sit there and you keep watching. You just keep watching. And I remember every detail of those pajama pants. The cat, the cat's belly, for some reason, it's just embedded in my brain forever. And I feel like that's fine. There's all these little vines. I think one of my favorite things about that vine and that viner is that that's a South Korean viner. All of her other vines, like the ones where she speaks, nothing is in English. When that vine blew up, it blew up mildly. She was like, shit.

posted a Vine that was like, look, I don't know why English people are following me now. Welcome. I don't speak English. And like she said this in English and it's like a little bit broken, accented. And then she goes on to continue posting in Korean, like 100 percent Korean. Unbothered queen. Unbothered. And I had friends who were fans of that one Vine. And so periodically I would update them on new content that she had posted translating the Vines for them. And that was just a thing that happened for a while. Love it. Yeah. So you just made me think of one of the other things that I think Vine sort of nailed as a format is this like wordless.

globally accessible video. Like I was just looking up KB Lame, who eventually became one of the like huge stars on TikTok, just making videos where he would just like silently make fun of other people's videos and he would just point at stuff. And there's this like language to these videos that sort of only ever mattered once you got to the internet and anyone anywhere with no context whatsoever could see it, that all of these things started to figure out in really cool, simple ways. All right, that's a good one. Let's do, Mia, your first one. Do you want to set this up for us? This man with a Krispy Kreme hat, I think. It's a self-shot video. Back at it again. And they're...

There's no one in the Krispy Kreme that I can see, but apparently was very busy. Does this crazy tumbling pass of multiple backflips. And at the very end, his feet just mash the Krispy Kreme sign and then it stops. Let's watch it. Let's do it. Back at it again at Krispy Kreme. OK, so this this is one of the vines. If you had not played this for me, I never would have thought of it again. Exactly. I was so mad when I was like, oh, my God, how could I have forgotten? Because a friend sent it to me like recently when I was prepping for this. And I was like, holy shit, like this changed the world.

Truly. I am obsessed with this Vine. It's so funny. It's one of those perfect ones that you can watch. It's like candy. You can keep watching it over and over and over. There's no setup. There's no context. Who is this man? Why is he in Krispy Kreme? Does he often flip here? Who's filming? Who's watching? What happened after the video? I'm obsessed with it. And this was like the Vine that I remember loving, where it is slice of life, but really weird slices of life from a complete stranger. You know nothing about them, but they do or encounter something really weird and bizarre, and suddenly you get to know about it. Actually, there was a...

New York Magazine article about this vine, which like correctly identified it as the best vine ever. And they found the guy. They did some sleuthing. And I loved the article because it gave you no more detail about why this happened. He did not. He was like, yeah, I love to tumble. And like I was in Krispy Kreme and I had someone film me. And I was like, you know what? Yeah.

Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. And he did say that the sign, in fact, fell, but he wanted to make it clear that he landed on his feet. He was like, you saw me. I landed on my feet. He ran away from the cops who had been called to the Krispy Kreme. And then I think it was fine in the end. But again, he did not explain why he was doing this.

The back added again at Krispy Kreme, like that is now going to be, now that I remember this video, I am going to say this forever, all the time, every day. It's like part of my vernacular. It is very good. It's also such a viney vine. Like I remember one of the things I was reading in prepping for this was saying that it was like the perfect vine comedy was not like six seconds of like set up punchline. It was like set up subversion and then the video is over, right? And it's like you set up a joke and then you do something insane underneath the joke and then the video ends. And it is like, it causes that thing where your brain just goes, what the, and you have to watch it 25 more times. And this is like the perfect version because there's a million things.

you could do at Krispy Kreme that would be funny and one of them is not several backflips and then kick the sign out. It's so good. Does he mean to do it? Was he aiming? To kick the thing? No.

Which, again, I'm like, so have you done this tumble before? There's a tumbling pass before in this place. Because you're a little too familiar with the Krispy Kreme. Right. Was his idea just like, I'm just going to do a sick tumbling pass at a Krispy Kreme? Because that's not a good vine. I know. It's a bad vine. It's so, so, so good. It really, like, watching all the vines too, similar to what you were saying, David, it reminded me that, like, combined with, like, the looping, combined with, like, the audience, combined with the six seconds, it created a new language of humor and jokes that, like, I feel like people still rely on a lot. It's just like, there's a choppiness of TikTok. There's this, like, weird setup and something completely different. And you really don't need more than six seconds.

It's really true. All right, Marina, do you want to set up your first one? This is mispronouncing words that you see at the store and other various locations. Very funny guy. He's good.

Is this like the extended version? This is a bunch of different guys. Oh yeah, I think he had a series. I feel like we're just watching this man slowly lose his mind. Oh, that's a classic moment. The watermelon thing at the end is really iconic. I didn't realize it was him. Yeah, the watermelon thing is like a moment in history. Why this guy? Why did this stick out to you? So I believe it was Chasmiff. And I don't know, English is my second language. I'm an English major. So I was just, I mispronounced a lot of things. I still mispronounce things occasionally.

And seeing someone do it on purpose in such a creative way, it was great. Also, the cuts are incredibly short. Like you barely have time to process it and you end up reading. Exactly the way that he says it because he's saying it as you're looking at it. It's just a nice little asynchronic thing. Yeah, he did do a lot of those in every single one. Yes, and if you want to see it, the Internet Archive has all of them archived in one compilation. Only 72 people have viewed it so far. And you were all 72. Yes. Yeah, I like that because it is A, he does sort of slowly lose his mind over the course of it, you can tell, which is a very like, you see this with every creator online who like figures out a thing to do. They have to do that thing and then they have to do that thing.

slightly wilder every single time. And by the 50th time you do your thing, you have to just be completely unhinged from reality as you do it. And that's what people want from you. And it's great. And I think it's great. But this is also like, to me, I think trying to do like original comedy or whatever, way too much work. This is like find a bit and just do it a million times. It's perfect. It's so good. Yeah, it's very good. Sort of like the serial nature of it. Also, you sort of see like the emergent creator quality coming out, right? It's like no longer like a six second version of America's Funniest Home Videos. Like you're actually seeing sort of a nascent creator. Yeah, he's like building a thing. And he goes to Cannes. Like there's...

One where he's just stuck on reading French and correct. I mean, it's a perfect bit because you can do it with everything forever. He's like, he's making, he does it with naval oranges in the grocery store. It's very creative. The world is your oyster. Yeah, it's so good. Very fun. I love that one. All right, Sarah, what's your second one? All right, my second one goes down in political history. It is Hillary Clinton doing a Vine where it's, she goes, what is it? It's just Hillary. I'm just chilling in Cedar Rapids. This is, by a mile, the cringiest one any of you picked. Let me just play it. It's a picture of an iced tea.

I'm just chilling in Cedar Rapids. And then she's got her iced tea and it's got like a little like beer cozy on it that says Chillery Clinton on it. I've never believed anyone less than Hillary Clinton using the word chilling. And she's got the millennial pause in there. Like it's like it's it's really I feel it's magnificent because it sucks so much. But at the same time, it like captures like she understands Vine in the sense that she understands that what it's like not a produced Vine. Right. It's like it's got that like gritty quality of not being very good. But then on top of that, it's also not very good. So it's it's it is really.

It's up there with Pokemon Go to the polls in terms of like cursedness of pandering to the youth, but doing it ineffectually. Was this a thing at the time? Like, I have no recollection of whether this made any way. Oh, yeah. Did it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, that one's this one is this one's deeply encoded in my brain. Right up there with Pokemon Go to the polls. Like, it's just I remember. Yeah. This is, of course, during election season where Facebook is like it was the Facebook. Right. Right. It was the Facebook election. And then and then Twitter emerged into prominence like in political discourse after that. But like, yeah, so this is sort of maybe even.

a last gasp for Vine, but for sure, like, this was maybe apex, oh, the Dems are trying to have a digital strategy and it's not quite paying off, right? Like, where it really, yeah. You've got to hope that Vine is now in presentations about, like, how not to blow it with the kids that Democrats play for each other every election cycle. I mean, it's like, but what lessons can you even take away from it, right? Like, it's, like, so specific to a platform that is now dead. It's so specific to, you know, like, a candidate and her personality, right? And, like, also, like, the puns and references, like, don't really, they're all dated now. They weren't.

perfectly dated at the time. But it's like, yeah, everything is just so specific to that moment. Yeah. But one thing I thought was really interesting in all of the Vine research was like... nobody who was famous outside of Vine ever really figured out Vine. Anyway, I feel like most other platforms are a mix of like, like Justin Bieber has a lot of followers on Instagram, not because he's good at Instagram, but because he's Justin Bieber. You know what I mean? But like there were a few sort of otherwise celebrities who became a thing on Vine, like Ariana Grande, I think was big on Vine, but she was also like kind of already a pop star. Justin Bieber was like kind of big on Vine, but again, was already a pop star. But like the almost everybody at the top of Vine came out of Vine, which is just that. And there's like there's something to just like the language of this thing that no one knew. And so like lots of people who started on Vine.

have gone on to have like huge A-list celebrity kinds of careers. Shawn Mendes is the example that makes me happy. There are a lot of other examples like the Paul brothers that make me less happy. But there is like a who's who of YouTube now. Like David Dobrik was a Viner and Zach King was a Viner. And like just name after name after name. But like no regular celebrity really figured out Vine. I wonder if that's just because there was no time to figure out Vine for these folks. Like by the time everybody realized it was a thing, it was dying. I think it also like did require some...

creativity and a sense of humor because the like we i think when you see a vine that was really good you recognize it as like oh this hit but there wasn't really a formula unless you were doing the big elaborate like often kind of gross punchline joke scripted things. But otherwise, like, how are you going to show the potato vine to a celebrity and be like, so can you do this kind of thing? You know what I mean? Like, it's not, it's nonsensical. And that's what made it so great. Like, you know there were meetings where they played the potato vine and they were like, what's our potato vine? Absolutely. Like, the Lay's Chips people, I hope that they were on that. But it's really hard to, like, appropriate or adopt it in a way that I think other platforms, you know, it's like easy to be good at Instagram. Totally. But not so much for Vine. Yeah. Mia, I think this is a good segue to your next one, which I think did.

start a cultural phenomenon all by itself. Do you want to set this one up? Yeah, I think that there is a good argument for why this is the most important Vine, period. Really? Maybe some of the most important internet content, period, also. I agree. So, yeah, let's watch it and then I have a lot to say. All right, let's do it. We in this bitch, finna get crunk. Abraz on fleek, the fuck.

Okay, I kind of forgot about this for a minute until I watched it and I was like, immediately, this person, her name is Kaylin Newman. And she's just sitting in her car recording. She's sitting in her car. Yeah, she's sitting in her car. She's just like a normal girl and makes this video where she gives the world a new term, a new word, fleek.

goes from her mind to being used by, you know, like Denny's and stuff, like brands, by celebrities. It becomes part of the way that we talk about aesthetics. And I think I really wanted to pick this one because I think it's important to say, too, that like so much of Vine culture and by extension, popular culture was made by young black Internet users, like black kids, creative kids who were funny and interesting. And this is just there were interviews with Kayla as well, being like, this is just something I thought of when I was sitting in my car. And then people at my mom's church asked her about it and being like, have you seen your daughter's video? And, you know, unsurprisingly, like she made no money from this, even though it was absorbed into sort of like.

capitalist marketing machine. And this feels like sort of the accidental virality, accidental movement thing that everyone is aspiring towards now. People are trying to coin terms. People are trying to coin concepts in hopes that it becomes something and maybe they get a brand deal or it can catapult them to having their own brand of yoga apparel or whatever it is, lunchables, you know. But it just feels like such a beginning of like, we all just realized how big making stuff online and putting it online could be. And I think it's like...

It really is like one of those things that I think should go in. This is virgin history. Like this vine only is enough to explain so much about the creator economy and the influencer industry and the way that, you know, individual smart, funny people collide with like giant machines, the machinery of, you know, PR departments. It's like on fleek also just sort of entered the English lexicon. It just did. It became English. And like there are a lot of moments like that in the history of English. I don't know if we have like a single definitive moment where, oh, yes, we filmed the moment.

this thing entered the English lexicon. We have a lot of places where we're like, oh, we suspect this is the first time anyone used this in this way. But no, we know for sure this is the first time. This is eyebrows on fleek. This is it. This is on fleek. Eyebrows on fleek. And I just, it's like, again, we have creators, especially in TikTok, trying to do that.

But all of their phrases and catchphrases and stuff, they're so long. They're like long sentences, right? They're like long bits. On fleek is like, it's so short, so concise. You can almost imagine it being French, right? It's like, oh, on fleek. Or like a town like al fresco, like something like that, right? Like it just, it fits. It fits into English. There's one meaning. Yes. It's not up for interpretation. There's no discourse cycle about on fleek where there was for girl dinner, whether it's like problematic or whatever. You know what I mean? No. On fleek means one thing. It came from Kayla's brain and it was moved. It was used to move a bunch of products. That's what gets me. It's like, this person made no money from this. Well, what's funny now is like, this is a much.

less good example of the thing, but, like, you look at, like, the Hawk Tua TikTok phenomenon, and it's, like, the line from I said a thing that a lot of people started repeating to I made money from that thing is now so straight and so simple. She launched a podcast, right? Like, this is what you do. The meme coin. The meme coin. You rock-pull a bunch of people on the internet. You, like, there were merch. She got a trademark. Like, it became all, like, you know what to do now when you go viral. There's no roadmap. There's, like, a business and a playbook. Yeah, and, like, there's, A, no chance she was thinking about that and making something like this. And, B, when it happens, we just didn't, none of that infrastructure existed. And by the time...

you even like see what's happening, it had gotten so big and so far away from her that she didn't get what she should have for something like that. Whereas now it's like the minute you upload, it's like, I have filed 11 trademark applications. And it's like, we have business-ified all of this in a way that I think makes it, even when it works, it makes it feel worse. It feels worse and it almost defangs it also. Because like on fleek, because that machinery wasn't there, I do feel like it more casually entered the language. But maybe it also speaks to the power of the phrase, right? Whereas Haktua, that's the Haktua girl. You're not thinking Haktua something else. When we say on fleek, we don't necessarily think of her. We think of...

eyebrows. We think of eyebrows looking a certain way in a certain period. It's a style. It's like, yeah, like you can casually drop it and you know what it is without someone's face flashing through your head because it is part of our language as opposed to a trademark. Yeah. And I think it really, it's interesting to see.

What happened with On Fleek versus what happens with things like Haktua or anything else that like people now there's sort of an expectation from people on the Internet that you should own the creative work. Like this is a creative work and this is a thing of culture. Whereas back then it was just like, oh, I just heard this word. I'm not interested really in where it came from or who came up with it. And now like if this if On Fleek happened right now, there would be a million outraged.

fans of hers that were saying, why aren't you crediting Kayla for on fleek? Which in some ways, you know, is good that we can acknowledge that this kind of language has not just cultural value, but monetary value. But yeah, it's one of those things that is like so crazy that it happened the way it is because right now it's unthinkable that this would just like fly under the radar, become absorbed into everyone's vernacular, and then just like the person who created it disappears. Isn't it in like 5 million songs? It's everywhere. Like, yeah, like it's wild. Like it just, it happens. And there's like...

Again, this has happened in the history of English language. Peter Pan is the first time that the name Wendy appears. Wendy wasn't a name. We still don't know what Wendy is short for. Yeah, it's a good one. I like it. All right, Marina, what's your second one? Okay, so this is actually a nice transition because this is someone who did make money, kind of indirectly from the vine directly, but this is by Nicholas Fraser.

I think you could make a case this is the most iconic vine. It's up there. It's a bop. It's really good. Why'd you pick this one? So Complex tracked this guy down. And I think the one brilliant inflection point in this vine is when he's like, my God, offbeat. So they're like, how did you come up with that? He's like, I always say that. That's just how I say, oh my God. So he got his personality in there. It's just very pure.

And in 2022, he sold an NFT of this fight for $96,000. It feels like it should be higher than that. It really does. I'm like, that's kind of cheap. What? Yeah, NFTs shouldn't be worth anything, but also he should have sold that for way more. Yeah. I wonder what it's worth now. Let's see if I can find it. He came up with it in the grocery store. I think he heard Next Close from 1997. He started humming the new song and just shot. There's just a very pure creative process there, so I really admire it. And it just sticks in your head. I've used a screenshot.

of him acknowledging the lie in so many Slack communications throughout the years. Just like, oh, you filed that draft? Yeah. Stop fucking lying. Yeah. There's a Jay Wortham tweet that's about this achieving escape velocity where the song is playing in a car and then the whole neighborhood can hear it and everyone screams, stop fucking lying at the right moment. It's, yeah. Why do you think this became that? Just to watch it, this is not a particularly...

It's a very viney vine, but I feel like there are a million vines that look and feel a lot like this one. I mean, it's the, oh my God, that's part of it. But I think that, when did this one drop? This was August of 2015. Okay, so a lot of lying was happening in this period. And so this was the correct reaction to everything. This was, I think, the year in which lies were beyond, yeah, this was 2015 into 2016. You had to just reply to everything with this because it was, yes, you wanted people to, my God, stop fucking lying. Yeah, and it works. Something like this hits.

over and over and over again. And then the screen grab of the moment where he's going, like, that's like, it also, it turns into shorthand for the whole thing, for the whole six seconds or whatever. Like, yeah. And then you can just keep sending it to people on Slack. It's a true meme. Yeah. You can hear his voice when you see just the still. Even if you don't, like, I feel like there aren't that many vines, maybe, that if you saw just a still, you would know what it's from, other than the Krispy Kreme one. And Eyebrows on Sleep, which is why I picked both of them. But he is, like, a character in and of himself. He just, like, represents an entire emotion.

Yeah, it's a really good one. All right, I just want to play two more from our honorable mention list here, and then we're going to take a break. But I feel like both of these just belong on the list of at least David's very favorite Vine ever. This one, I think, is maybe the best use of music as a visual cue ever on Vine. This is a bunch of umbrellas on the beach. Run.

This is just like a perfect line because it's just, fundamentally, it's just a video of a windy day on a beach. A bunch of umbrellas are just going down the beach because it's windy. But it's the perfect, perfect, perfect choice of music. And it just makes the whole joke. And it is delightful. I love it very much. It's so good. All right. We need to take one more break and we're going to go back and do the version of straight questions. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So every episode, we do the same questions about the product we're talking about. Today, it's Vine. Question number one, what was the best thing about Vine? Marina, you go first. It was the original version that you couldn't edit it. It was just one continuous slice of life and the repeat. I think you could make a pretty compelling case that Vine got worse when they started allowing people to post stuff that they had made elsewhere. It lost the spontaneous element of it and even the fake spontaneous element of it.

I like it. It's a good answer. Mia, what do you think? I think like the non-monetizable element of it where there was just no commerce involved. I think it started, I started souring on it when like brands would commission vines and stuff. And it was just like, you're not supposed to be here. Like silence brand, you know, don't post here. So when it was purely just feral children making videos.

Sarah, what do you think? I liked the brevity. It's like you don't see that kind of dedication to brevity in platforms anymore. And yeah, I think that that was something special. I actually kind of think all three of those are sort of the same thing, which is like by some mixture of sort of the culture of the place and the actual construct of the app, you just couldn't try that hard in a way that really worked for Vine. It was both gross and impossible to do really great.

high production value work. It's also really hard to sell ads against six-second clips. No pre-roll. Just no little clip, just subliminal messaging, maybe. Yeah, like a flash. You don't even see it. Yeah, no, I tend to agree. I think the thing that ultimately, I think, cost it was, A, to your point, there was probably never a way to monetize this in any useful way for anybody. Like, the Vine shop, I don't think would have worked in the way. Ads would not have worked. But, like, there was something sort of beautiful about that mess that I think you probably couldn't do otherwise. Question number two, what was the worst thing about Vine? Sarah, you were first on this one.

So maybe this was a good thing, but maybe it was also a bad thing. I'm not sure. The lack of algorithm, I think, like discoverability was really rough with Vine. Like it had to sort of travel with a parallel platform in order to see the really good stuff, essentially, which for me, it was Twitter. There was a lot of Twitter that was just invented. Right. Yeah. And like that worked for me. But it's also like it means that this platform never is quite fully a platform for me. Right. But on the other hand, as soon as you bring algorithms into it, you get a whole other can of worms.

I don't even know. We shouldn't even go down that rabbit hole, right? I think everyone who's watching this knows, like, oh, as soon as you bring an algorithm into something, you've got a whole other mess of issues. I mean, ironically, we know exactly what it looks like. That's what happened after. Right. And it's, yeah. So it's like, and then, you know, you've got the Vine house gaming essentially the charts, but that's because there isn't like a nonstop reel of Vines that like, right, that's algorithmically determined for people. But still, like, yeah, I think that not having the algorithm meant that Vine was doomed to not go anywhere. And it also meant that discoverability suffered. And maybe that was in some ways a good thing, but I do think it hobbled the platform. It's a good take. I like that. Me, what do you think?

I think a bulk of the humor was the worst thing about Vine. The sort of more, I'm sorry, the popular Viners maybe were the worst thing because the polishedness, like it's very impressive, but some of the content is truly nasty. And, you know, we were talking about this before, but I think it's interesting that in these compilations of best Vines, that content is never represented. Nobody is thinking about that stuff as being like the sort of peak of comedy on Vine. I actually went back and looked up some of these big Viners now, and some of them have like just...

have kids and, like, post nice photos of their family. But some of them are still doing that shit. And that was really, like, profoundly sad to me because it feels trapped in this era that, in a lot of ways, was, like, way worse, you know, culturally than things are now. Well, debatable. But, yeah, I was like, damn, you're still doing the, like, girlfriend finds out she's the side chick videos. Like, that's crazy to me. Yeah, they're just longer and worse now. Yeah, yeah. And you're 35, which is insane. I know. Every time I see a video of somebody who just, like...

you know, snap cut to them getting pushed into a pool. It's like, oh, you're just doing fine. That's bad. I don't like this very much. Yeah. Yeah. My answer was also going to be all of the popular fighters. Some of whom have gone on to have like better, more interesting careers. But just reading some of the names, it's like Logan Paul and Jake Paul and David Dobrik and Nash Greer and Lele Pons and Brittany Furlan. It's like a lot of them are not full of things. What if fine is bad, actually? Yeah, right? What if fine is bad? It's a not wrong theory, which is a real bummer. Marina, what's yours? What's the worst thing about fine? I tend to agree, though. Top humor was...

Quite bad. And because it wasn't, I just wonder what would happen if that early on we combined the algorithm and the bad humor. Would they have dominated or would it have suppressed it? It's unclear, yeah. Because then you had your friends tell you, hey, this is a better mind. It's like more of a personal recommendation, which is something that I miss from social networks a lot. I guess it's drowned out by the algorithm. So, yeah. It is an interesting thing because even at that time.

Like we knew about algorithms, right? Like it would have been easy for Vine instead of saying, you know, we're going to manually curate the popular page so that it isn't just full of objectionable stuff that we hate to actually start to do some of the work to personalize this stuff, to be like, okay, we're going to make it so that it's not just these 20 people who get to control the entire platform and what everybody sees. We're going to start to like make some of these changes. Like that was work Twitter was doing anyway on its own platform. It's very weird that it didn't push on any of that stuff. All right. Question number three, would Vine have been a bigger hit if Apple had made it?

Mia, you go first. Okay, I read this question and I was like, what does this mean? I honestly have no idea, but my take is that it's good that Vine failed the way it did. I think it's like, that kind of like adds to the cultural pull and the appeal of Vine is that we didn't really, I mean, in some ways we watched it with her, but it wasn't this like slow decades long drag. It just was like, okay, now we're not Vining anymore. And that's kind of the like...

the cost of being early. It's like really, it was really striking to me how much of TikTok is just straight Vine and how much Musical.ly was just straight Vine in a way. I mean, there's like the timing is not an accident, right? Vine died and then they just made another one. Yeah. And that's how Musical.ly started in a real way. Yeah. And I think it's good that Vine did not become TikTok. Like that's, I'm happy. That's fair. Marina, what do you think? Did Apple have made Vine work? Apple would never. Yeah, I don't think that, I think like the best part of it is this like grittiness, like the scruffiness, like the real element of it. So I think having...

like a more polished platform, would have taken away from that. Yeah. That's kind of Ryland, too, is Apple is not famously great at knowing what's cool. No. And they would have had a lot of, like, really lovely videos that no one watched. Vine would have looked like Apple TV+. Yeah. They look great, but there's not a lot going on. Yeah. There's a music by U2 in the background. Yeah. Something that I think is actually interesting looking at these Vines is that they come from an era where it's, like, cheap and easy to make video where you can actually see stuff, but it's not yet very good, right? Whereas if all of these were shot on, like, iPhones now.

it would just be a different quality. There would be a different quality to it. There would be a different feel to it. And I don't know if that would be good. Like, I don't know. I think it would be less funny. I think it would be much less funny on iPhones today. And so I think Apple would not make Vine work. Like, I think that they would want it to look better than this and looking better than this would be worse. Yeah, I completely agree. Also, Apple's history with social networks suggests that we are all correct about this. Question number four, if you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? So we're installing the four of us as the heads of Vine circa 2012. To me, the answer is just don't sell to Twitter. Seems very clear.

Start there. But then I would like to have $30 million. So I don't know. I'm torn. What would you all do differently? Marina, you go first. Leave the limitations. I'm going to keep saying this. I think there was a notion that not having a lot of features was what was getting it down. But I think having limitations in your creative work is really freeing. And maybe it wouldn't have made any money, but we would have gotten more good content out of it that way or more different content. So, yeah.

Is it possible that the right answer is to make it like 15 seconds instead of six? No, absolutely not. Are you sure? I mean, they told you how they figured it out. Yeah, your answer is very compelling and full of... Not too long, not too short, just right. Part of me feels like, again, I think the six seconds thing is like, it is the reason so much of the things that work, work. But I just keep coming back to what you're saying about politicians. It is a very specific thing to do. And it's like, if you make it 15 seconds and you give people, do you give people more things to do? Or is that just not a point of find?

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't the point of Vine. Like you would have to pivot Vine like rather severely into almost like forking it into two different products that are combined on the same platform, right? Where you've got the Vines, but then you've got longer Vines or whatever. What would you call a longer Vines? Yeah, probably like trees or something. And it would be, I don't know, like the way when TikTok...

you could get longer TikToks at some point, right? And that shifted the nature of the platform as well. And it did make it worse. I hate it. There's nothing worse than when you scroll onto a TikTok and you're like, oh my God, this is 10 minutes long. I know. I really don't like it. And then there's part two. Oh God, yeah. It's not good. But at some point, in order to make this a thing that's more viable to bring, I don't know, politicians, celebrities, brands onto, you do kind of need to fork it also to be able to sell ads against, assuming that you turn this into an advertising business.

But really, the number one thing that I would have worked on would have been music. Like, it's like the music part, I think, is really key. I think you can see it really early on with the vines, too, is that, like, there is something about adding music to the vine that changes things and makes it stick a little more. And making that smoother, more integrated with, like, rights and so on and so forth would have, I think, made this have sticking power in a way that it never did. That's a good one. Yeah. Mia, any other thoughts? Probably, unsurprisingly, I would further suppress the most popular people. That was my second choice. Yeah, I would redo the Hype House. Because that is...

a really weird legacy to have in terms of like the broader entertainment industry of like you just are home to a bunch of really loud boys who have bad jokes. So I don't know. Maybe that's maybe that's mean of me. My other question was going to be if the four of us are running Vine, do we sign the deal with the Viners? So I would have looked to monetize for creators in some way, but I don't think that it would have been those finers. But at the point at which they levied the ultimatum, it was too late. They had already hijacked the platform. So you need to cut that off faster. You need to stop that. And you need to treat it as though it's similar to a spam problem, essentially. When someone has figured your platform out to that degree, you've got a problem on your hands. Because what you've got is not...

what people actually want to see. They've figured out your charts and that's not the same as making good content. But yeah, so it's like yes and no. I think you can't sign the deal and the goal is to basically get to the point where you don't have to have that conversation in the first place. You have to figure out some way for people to make money on your platform, which is like, this does feel like sort of the last gasp of not knowing that. And we come out of Vine being dead and immediately everybody's like, okay, the main thing we have to do is take care of our creators and help them make a business out of this platform and that's how we win. Everybody learned that the day Vine died, it seems like, which is sort of insane to think about. All right, number five.

What feature of Vine should every current version have? So we're taking one thing out of Vine and we're putting it into every other social media platform that exists now. What is it? Make it six seconds long. That was going to be my answer, too. I kind of like the idea, like, Sarah, what you were saying about you have the Vine section and the SuperVine section. I think every social media app should have to have a Vine section. It's just six seconds and we just do it again. Even if it's just old Vines, I'm fine with that. Yeah, in some ways I like how Vine was literally just one concept rather than the Everything app, which everything is now trying to be. Like, they didn't load it up with new shit. They didn't load it up with new features, with new buttons, really. And that is something that I would love to see. It's also like, I really get annoyed when...

apps like change small things that like actually like they're constantly tweaking it and changing it. And I don't really remember Vine doing it that much. They added different functionalities, but like for the most part, what it started as was what it ended as, at least like technically. You can make a compelling argument that was a problem. Also, I do think there is something there is something about the app that was great because of that. Yeah. Well, by the time they started changing things, Vine was dead already. Right. Exactly. Vine for kids, 140 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. The feature changes were like a sign of distress and not. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that some of those constraints, I think, should go back into these things. Because now I look at TikTok and it's everything to everyone all the time in a way that is like, it just feels bad. We all watch it, but it feels bad. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which Vine was more or even more successful? If we do it early or later or we change something, can we make Vine work better?

I think there is an alternate timeline where Vine was TikTok. If the timing had been a little bit different, if it had been run by different people, if they had worked out some rights issues because they had prioritized certain things over other things, I think there is a world in which Vine was TikTok and TikTok never happened. One version of this I have found really interesting is what if Vine ended up in the Instagram spot at Facebook? Instead of being bought by Twitter essentially as a response to that, what if... What if we came Reels first and then the photos later? I think that's possible. I think that is possible. I mean, you'd have to have different...

staff, different, I mean, different everything, right? But it's like, can I imagine that universe? Yes. How close is it to this universe? Pretty far. Pretty far. That's fair. Marina, is that what you think too?

I just like that it didn't succeed. Like it had to crawl so TikTok could wobble. I don't know. Yeah. So that makes me think you think the answer is no. No. That like this thing was always going to be. It had to fail. It was too early. It was like a trial run. Yeah. I think there's something to that. And I do think, again, like the industry learned so much from how badly that went that a lot of people have just aggressively not made those same mistakes over the years. All right. Last question. Does Vine belong in the Virgin History Hall of Fame? The Virgin History Hall of Fame, like all halls of fame everywhere, is nebulous and complicated and mostly based on vibes. But the question in front of us basically is like, was Vine?

important enough. Like, in the annals of history, did Vine, like, capital M matter enough to belong in the Hall of Fame? And I would remind you that there are a lot of things vying for access to the Hall of Fame. Does Vine belong? Well, its legacy is, like, our reality now. Like, it's almost the dominant media format. So, I think so.

It's tricky because it's like I think you can both make the case that it was the thing before the thing. Right. And that it was the thing that invented the thing. Right. Like it's one of those. And it's right on the line between was it friend feed before Facebook or was it like the thing that made all of this possible? And I don't I've never been able to tell how I feel about Vine on that front.

Yeah, I'm struggling a bit. I'm kind of leaning no just because I don't like Vine as a platform is not as important as like the cultural output. And I don't I guess like I'm not sure in version history. What is it? Museum? The Hall of Fame. OK, sorry. In the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Are we talking strictly like the platform itself? Are we talking like the ripple effects of it? Both? I think I'll allow both, but only if the platform at least gets close on its own. You know what I mean? Like I'll give you.

cultural ripple effects as a tiebreaker, but the platform has to be, you know, almost there on its own. Yeah, that's why I'm struggling a little bit. It's a hard one because, like, for sure, Vines belong in the Hall of Fame, right? Like, they're historically very, very significant. But Vine, the platform, it's really hard to give credit to it because, yes, there were specific aspects that made it special and, like, you know, put its imprint on the content that was created, but at the same time, it was so badly run and they made so many wrong decisions that it's hard to want to give them credit. It's just like, you definitely shouldn't have done it like this, but yeah.

Yeah. So I don't know that that is like a real cusp. It is. I think I think we should land on no. But I think someday when we get a huge funding grant, we open the content wing of the Virgin History Hall of Fame. I think I think the On Fleek video gets like a wing named after it. The On Fleek video is in the Virgin History Hall of Fame. I want to say that. OK. Vine, maybe not, but On Fleek is. OK. Well, right now it's just like it's just like sort of in a box waiting for us to open the new building. But when we open the new building. Yes. It'll be there. Yes. All right. I forgot about it. All right. That is it for the show. Thank you all for doing this. This was so much fun. I have not seen this many Vines in a minute. And this was.

delight. Thank you for being here with us too. As always, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And if you want to support us and all of this and everything, the best way is to subscribe to TheVersion.com. We'll see you next time. Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Barkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

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