The Most Obvious Reasons Vine Was Doomed to Fail

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.