The Most Obvious Reasons Vine Was Doomed to Fail

Updated September 23, 2019 1.7k votes 199 voters 6.3k views

List RulesVote up the things you think contributed to Twitter's decision to kill Vine.

Do y’all remember Vine? That Twitter-owned video platform on which people could share six-second videos that were usually super weird and sometimes very funny? Well it’s dead. And you killed it. Maybe that’s too harsh; there are a few different reasons Vine is shutting down, but one of them is that you definitely never used it. You either downloaded the app and tried to make a video once, or you just ignored it and watched longer, more coherent videos on literally every other social media platform. Now that the app is dead and buried you can say goodbye to Vine and delete it from your phone to make space for the new app that’s going to spring to life in Vine’s wake, only to become irrelevant in three years.

The reasons Vine shut down range from the mundane ins and outs of the current social media climate, to the fact that the thing that kills every cool subculture killed Vine: greed. When the app began, Vine was a place where incredibly strange and often very funny six-second videos appeared that made use of the brevity of the format. Once videos like “Cinnabon-Iver” became a hit, companies flocked to the biggest users and gave them money to start shilling their products. Users then abandoned it en masse. That’s not the only reasons why Twitter killed Vine, but it’s a big one.

Shed a tear for the lowly app, and vote up the things you think contributed most to the untimely demise of Vine. Then check out the best accounts on the new Vine-like app, TikTok.

1
109
20
People Watched Vines on YouTube and Facebook Instead
2
86
22
The Original Viners Who Made the Platform Fun Left After a Couple of Years
3
67
21
Vine's Initial Concept Changed Once Advertisers Discovered They Could Use It to Sell Products
4
67
28
Instagram Incorporated Videos, Which Made Vine Unnecessary
5
69
33
Snapchat Took Vine's Millennial Base
6
58
25
Nobody Wants to Watch Whiny Teens Getting Paid to Feature Sponsored Products
7
46
14
Branded Content Took Over

8
52
23
Half of the Videos on Vine Were Ads
9
39
32
Vine Began as Something Weird and Impossible to Monetize
10
41
62
The Only Person on Vine Was Bo Burnham
11
20
38
It Was Only Used to Promote Other Social Media Channels
12
34
62
No One Wants to Watch Teenagers Act Like Idiots on a Loop
13
17
42
Vine Never Kept Up with Social Media Trends
14
30
67
Most of the Videos Were Really Stupid
15
17
47
People Were Exhausted by Having to Use One More App
16
21
58
It Was a Separate App When It Should Have Been a Part of Twitter
17
12
46
Goofy Loops Don't Enough Mass Appeal
18
12
49
Users Were Annoyed by the App's Autorepeat
19
10
35
Pirated Videos from World Star Hip Hop Weren't Enough to Keep the Platform Afloat
20
12
67
Six-Second Videos Are Useless
21
10
63
People Prefer Sharing Pictures, Not Videos