We’d all like to think that the gradual rise of real life Dumb and Dumber white boys Logan and Jake Paul was the nail in Vine’s tiny, ever-looping coffin. The two brothers were among the most popular users on the service, integral in launching it to popularity and still remain prominent in still insanely popular Vine compilations that cover a good portion of YouTube. But really, Vine’s death was prompted by it’s failure to adapt — as if it even could?
A Vine is a Vine because of its length. Its 6.5 second limit is part of its branding, its appeal, its integrity; lose the length, you lose everything. With the proliferation of short video content (and capabilities) rising in more functional, varied apps like Snapchat and Instagram, Vine began to shake in its boots. But change is always happening within our rapidly-changing, short-attention spanned lives. Nothing has a permanent shelf life. Cultural value comes and goes.
As projected in my Development post, we decided to look at the ‘unregulated length’ of these mediums, which, in the case of Vine, we’ve flipped to ‘regulated length’. How does Vine work as this video analog to Twitter’s short-form text posts, if it does at all? How has Twitter’s decision to up the character count from 140 to 280 affected this?
As demonstrated in my Project Work post, it’s a mess. The hypothesis goes out the window. Even at 140 characters, its nigh impossible to speak the chunk of text in any way that doesn’t sound like intelligent voice assistant-in-human-form Janet begging for her digital life in Netflix’s The Good Place. When bumped to 280, its plain hard to watch.
More than anything this experiment highlights the tricky situation that Vine ended up in that ultimately led to its death. Whereas Snapchat added more functionality and showed a willingness to adapt to its growth, and Instagram grew into the behemoth it now is, Vine couldn’t hold pace. Without risking a betrayal of its brand, there was nothing it could do. Users wanted to see more and more and more from their content creators, and popularity grew in applications that could service this. People wanted stories, fleeting moments, content that could be tapped through at will, content less concrete. To the average consumer, Vine’s central idea proved too precarious to make engaging content. Twitter was one thing, Vine was another — they couldn’t gel, and business took its toll.
Snapchat recently dropped their 10 second limit, letting users record for an infinite amount of time. This is the current landscape; constraints no longer matter.
Facebook’s new video-favouring algorithm marks an antagonist to the vibe that Vine was on. Along with the video, sound was integral to Vine — to jokes, to music, to loops — and Facebook is now full of videos with hard-coded text designed to be eye-catching. It’s a new way of engaging with news in a way that appeals to our clickbait sensibilities.
What if Vine never stood a chance? For some content creators it was a blessing, an interesting way of creating a new type of content that couldn’t be done with anything else. Vine was always the dark horse but never hit the peaks that its contemporaries rested at. Constraints are out, the infinite and endless abyss of content is in. With Vine 2 on some distant horizon, is a resurgence of regulated lengths coming? Can something like Vine work again now that their exists no limits?