Can someone explain to me what happened to Vine? I feel like it beat TikTok to the punch by ~8 years before it was bought and then unceremoniously killed by Twitter. Was that the first example of US innovation being suffocated by the big tech oligopoly?
Vine's an example of the beginning of great idea that wasn't taken to its full potential. There are significant key differences between vine and tiktok. There are three that come to mind.
Tiktok expanded allowed uploaded video duration up to 3 minutes.
The For You Page algorithm (which drives the content you see in the feed) is scarily impressive in how it can match the viewer with content they would most want to see.
Lastly, and probably most importantly (in my opinion) Tiktok fosters a home for a vast number of entertaining and informative content creators that give them an edge. Vine mostly went for entertainment in quick six second bursts.
> Tiktok fosters a home for a vast number of entertaining and informative content creators that give them an edge
Vine did this too which is a big part of why it's so surprising to me: Vine didn't just have the tech but they had the community. You can still find Vine compilations on YouTube with millions of views that capture the vibrant set of content creators that Vine once had.
Honestly the only real difference between Vine and TikTok in my mind is that Vine was more focused on comedy while TikTok is more focused on music. Otherwise the two services were pretty much identical.
TikTok had a much better creator reimbursement platform and partnerships built in from the start, and benefited a lot from the early work Twitch and YouTube did setting the tone here, as well as the growth of "influencer culture" leading to further brand and advertising involvement in the space.
The amount of content, the type of it, and the number of people out there willing to make goofy content - I mean young and old alike ... is amazing.
The number of people with cellphones and decent cameras recording 'everything' means we now have all sorts of vidoes of 'guy fishing and whale breaches' or literal lighting strikes etc..
And the normalization of content creation, of likes, of views, the possibility of making money from it etc..
Basically the tools, cultural norms, media and social systems - all reached a critical mass some time after Vine.
If Vine were to have held on, evolved along the lines you indicated, they might have beak TikTok to it.
Oh - and one last point: TikTok started with cute dancing girls among teens. That content category is a great place to start, break through, and get a critical mass going before breaking into parrots swearing, cute babies, and funny challenges.
TikTok (or at least my experience with it) is largely focused on 15-second clips, so I'm not sure duration differences are the significant ones. It seems the algorithm's ability to surface engaging content on a per-user basis is more important than anything else.
I'm guessing content owners may have realized the value in letting people use tiny sections of their songs. Meme songs on tiktok likely generate huge profits when streams of that song jump.
Vine was funny (really funny) but Tiktok shows you what you want to see, and that’s more powerful. It’s very effective and scarily addictive in a way Vine wasn’t.
Combination of easy to use editing tools and effects to emphasise creativity together with the sound tracks. It’s often missed but the soundtracks were (still) are a big reason for it’s traction. It’s become the new mtv
Tiktok is much better as it allows people to infinitely remix existing content. Like a video with a funny sound? With one tap you can make your own and get that "SEO" juice from using that popular sound.
I think the biggest difference is that the number of mobile-app users worldwide is double that from 2016, when Twitter announced they were shutting vine down.
When Vine started in 2012 there were only ~1B smartphone users.
Twitter is allergic to making good business decisions. Even later on, they never attempted to resurrect Vine after TikTok showed the way and FB followed suit with Instagram Reels.
There's ads. Upon opening the app, I get one to apply to work at Chick-fil-A. After scrolling a number of videos, I got an for Givingli. No idea how much/little that pays the bandwidth bills, but the ads themselves are largely disguised as content - ads look just like any other content in the app. It does say sponsored while showing an ad, but it's subtle.
Yes TikTok has ads AND the ad rates are pretty high (I worked in marketing tech for a while and saw the rate card and the huge amount companies spend there)
I don't get why people keep saying vine should have been popular. Myspace beat facebook and look which survived. Myspace was never going to be like facebook. Why should vine have been as big as tiktok just because it was first? Theres plenty of examples of being first not being the winner.
Vine was shut down prior to TikTok's launch. Vine had struck gold and was discarded, then foreign copycats (TikTok and Musical.ly) filled the void. It's one thing for TikTok to beat Vine, another for Vine/Twitter to not even try.
At the very least it's an interesting parable of how short-sighted "innovative" big tech companies can be.
CCP propaganda won’t be a red flying with people chanting “China is great!” It will be something like “masks aren’t effective” to increase the impact of COVID on America.
All the videos I see on TikTok regarding COVID are all pro-mask/pro-vax/pro-science. I can see how others will be led down a different path though. Not sure it's intentional so much as showing people what they want to see, and I don't see how it's any different than, say, YouTube where one can also go down a rabbit hole and get stuck there.
And yet if you walk across the aisle, you will hear people saying the opposite: CCP propaganda is something like "vaccines are effective" to increase the microchip coverage, or whatever.
