I’ll never understand why Twitter killed Vine. It was everything TikTok became but years earlier. Everyone loved it and everyone would immediately start using it again if it came back. My only conclusion is that Twitter was heavily influenced by China so that the Chinese could push their product.
It was one of the most bizarre things. It lost like 100 million users. Its not like twitter did not introduce videos and stories later on. I was particularly sad on reading that one of the co-founders died in 2018
Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different.
Lot of TikTok popularity has come from offering songs/lip syncing functionality (done better by their acquisition of musica.ly). That wouldn't have worked on 6 second Vines.
Vine wasn't that long ago - eight years ago we were at the beginning of the hype cycle.
Nobody heard of it until Twitter bought it and then it was only people that care for Twitter that knew what Vine was. Only a minority of these people saw the point of Vine and only a minority of them thought to record a 'vine' for novelty value.
This minority may have appeared to be 'everyone' for the teenagers of the time. But Twitter was not for the teenage demographic. Think of the most famous user of Twitter - Donald Trump - and how old he is and how skilled he is with technology. Okay, he is an outlier, most Twitter users are younger but not that young.
When Vine was getting started the wider web industry were encouraging clients to get a social media presence. Adding Vine videos was never seriously proposed whereas hosting actual video on Youtube, Vimeo or even Instagram was very much part of a social media strategy.
The money just was not there for Vine with the silly six second limitation. Those that had made a name for themselves making content were able to move elsewhere and to 'grow up' into longer length video that did bring them income.
Vine was a failed product once the novelty wore off and the other social media applications had offered their own ways of hosting files that needed a video CODEC to play. Twitter had the good sense to close it down, moving with the times to have video work just fine in the main Twitter product.
There was absolutely nothing to do with China in any of this story. The Chinese Communist Party did not have a fight with Twitter about six second videos so that their all conquering Tik Tok could take over the world. That is an absurd idea. The only conclusion as to why Vine had to go was because it was not profitable.
