The last, greatest, totally harmless social network?
One of my favourite chapters in Ben Smith’s Traffic, crucial reading if you’re interested in how the web as we know it came to be, is on what he calls “the last, greatest, totally harmless moment of global internet culture”.
He posits that when the story of The Dress went viral in 2015 – and that’s viral in its truest sense of the word: wall-to-wall, Internet-breakingly viral – it represented a point in time where everyone could share, comment, and get behind something without it being torn to shreds along partisan lines.
If The Dress was the moment, I wonder if Vine was the network that represented a strange kind of coming-of-age – a social media platform that encouraged experimentation with storytelling form and structure, connected on- and off-line communities, but also foreshadowed darker days to come.
Vine was a video-sharing app that survived four tumultuous years (🪦 2013-2017. R.I.P.). Its USP was the 6-second limit it placed on video, which sounded ludicrously gimmicky at the time, but it caught on and thrived. It was acquired by Twitter while still in development, yet the app remained standalone – albeit with some light-touch integration into the mothership. Notably, no monetisation features were ever switched on and it remained ad-free until it died.
I loved Vine. It’s the most fun I ever had on social media, and it gave me a creative outlet that had mostly faded when my roles became less hands-on. Sometimes I would spend entire evenings pulling together stop-motion videos or experimenting with intercutting different clips. My little archive lives on, and still makes me smile: https://vine.co/tumshie (the clip from 30 November 2013 marks the point where I had less time to piss about on my iPhone).
To write off Vine as a frivilous distraction would be to ignore the cultural impact it had, both good and bad. It launched musicians and comedians’ careers, spawned a range of memes and phrases, and was reporting 200 million monthly active users at its peak. Music discovery and dance crazes that are now synonymous with TikTok first started to take shape on Vine, and Rolling Stone was writing about the memefication of music as far back as 2015.
Vine also played a role in the early Black Lives Matter movement, helping capture the outrage and aftermath of the police killing of teenager Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. With no inbuilt video feature on Twitter, and prior to the release of Periscope, having a means to shoot, upload and share footage quickly made it a unique tool for documenting events as they happened. Nearly a decade later, Elon Musk is sinisterly pumping X’s citizen journalism credentials as if it’s a new idea.
Speaking of X, during Linda Yaccarino’s shambolic interview at last month’s Code 2023 she repeatedly talked about multiple product innovations and claimed “there is no surrogate for X today” whilst struggling to name any feature of substance.
The bizarre, vague vision for X to become a Frankenstein’s monster app (a crudely stitched nightmare of posts + longer posts + spaces + trending topics + news + global town square + video + payments 🧟♂️😱) not only feels like something nobody wants or needs, but ignores the fact that most successful social platforms have found a niche and capitalised on it.
It’s ironic that Twitter had a product in its own stable that seized the short-form video initiative – pre-dating Snap, Instagram Reels, and of course TikTok – but simply didn’t know how, or want to, exploit it. Vine could have been that niche. But no, it wither.
But before I get all dewy-eyed about this lost social media saviour, as Taylor Lorenz’s article below makes clear, the rot was setting in. And it’s the rot that sadly dominates so much of our modern discourse: posts that were “frequently misogynistic, homophobic or racist”, insufficient content moderation, and an unpleasant hustle culture.
So yes, maybe there were “totally harmless”, fun, positive, even enthralling things about Vine, but by the time it was switched off a lot of inevitable unpleasantness had seeped in.
“This is why we can’t have nice things” – so true (other) Taylor, so true.
🍃 Vine as a focal point of Black social media: You may not have understood Vine, but its demise is a huge cultural loss
Aja Romano documents much of what made Vine special, and highlights how it was a “safe, comforting place to be Black on the internet”.
🍃 Vine as art: Limmy’s hour long supercompilation
You’d maybe expect Limmy to be described as comedy, or a Twitch pro, but when I saw this at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018 it definitely felt more like an unsettling, experimental piece of art.
🍃 Vine as comedy: Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal
Comedy tinged with sadness: the late Ryan McHenry created a funny, enduring meme about (pre-Ken) Ryan Gosling’s seriousness with a series of Vine posts. The unexpected twist when McHenry died suddenly, and Gosling responded, is one of those weird, touching, and transcendental Internet moments.
🍃 Vine in turmoil: Inside the secret meeting of Vine stars that ushered in the app’s demise
Taylor Lorenz catalogues the greed, chaos, and unavoidable staff exodus during Vine’s downward spiral.
🦉 Bonus bird content – Social Dilemma: What’s at Stake When We Propel Wild Birds to Stardom?
My good chum, and stupendous photographer, Andy Catlin sent me this fantastic article in response to my first newsletter. It’s equally relevant here as an illustration of how everything starts off rosy on social media, and then…
👋 Bye for now