Vine, which was acquired by Twitter in Oct. 2012 shortly before its launch, announced recently that it will be discontinuing its mobile app.
The social medium was long beloved for its endless loops of six-second video content, which created the ideal time-suck for those of us avoiding homework or studying.
It was different and simple all at once.
The idea of an extremely short video looped repeatedly seemed almost too easy and therefore unattractive.
However, Vine appealed to many users — primarily young people — for that reason.
Anyone can think of something creative for six seconds.
The app gave small-scale fame to some who became famous on a larger scale later.
Melissa Villaseñor, one of the newest Saturday Night Live cast members, gained fame as a viner.
However, the app has been losing its steam for a few years now due to other competitors like Instagram so maybe it finally is time to lay Vine to rest.
Some well-known viners like Obi Nwosu gave Vine up before the app even announced it was terminating its services.
Nwosu, a current IU student from Carmel, Indiana, said he deleted his Vine account about six months ago.
For him, Vine seemed more like an attention-grabbing competition than a platform for comedic creation.
He said it was “nice to feel like people noticed me and depended on me for laughs,” but ultimately Vine’s tendency to breed vanity is what made him leave.
That and that the quality of a lot of the content on the app seemed, at only six seconds long, rather cheap.
“It was reductive. It took so many aspects of comedy — the vulnerability, the risks, the investment, the honesty — and zapped them away.”
Though he does admit that the mere fact that Vine was online could have something to do with why the comedy on there felt so lacking. “I generally believe that most everything we enjoy in real face-to-face human interaction is cheapened when we experience them through a phone app,” Nwosu said.
So perhaps with the fall of Vine we may see some rise in the market for other, more human forms of comedy, like live sketch, standup and improvisation, or a larger quantity of video web content that is a bit longer.
It is important that we do not dwell on Vine’s death; rather, we should celebrate the good times we had and the laughs we shared.
Besides, Vine did confirm all of the pre-existing vines would still be available online.
If you’re ever feeling sad or moody you can go to the Vine graveyard and pay your respects.
Vine was a weird, small six-second blip on our world’s social media and communication timeline, but it was our weird small blip.
Rest in Paradise, Vine.
