Apparently Twitter is losing money at a rate large enough for them to not only lay off 9% of its total staff, but it’s killing off Vine, it’s video sharing service for 6 second looping video clips.
Good riddance I say.
Sure, some people used vine for more interesting clips; Voice actress Tara Strong, for example, did comedic clips including various character voices she had done. Others, however, weren’t so original. Random comedy edits that aren’t too funny, tons of “forced” videos, that try way too hard to be something major in that 6 seconds, videos that are over-produced and clearly edited outside of the Vine application and thrown on there for the hell of it, and lastly, worst of all… memes. Forced memes.
Remember that idiocy that was “Damn Daniel” or the absolutely pointless “What are Those?!?” memes of the past year or so? Yep. That’s the kind of junk that began to populate vine over time, forced attempts at memes, attempts to be funny when they just.. weren’t. While “Damn Daniel” was a full on twitter video, it’s the style of “content” which constantly got spread around vine.
To be fair, this isn’t much different from YouTube, on a whole; the only difference is vine, being newer, had a more tight knit ecosystem, much like YouTube did back in 2006-2008 or so, where pretty much everyone saw the same things. Vine, however, never matured. It started off in this odd state and never changed, always being this odd repository for either overproduced copyright-stealing bullshit (seriously, the number of vines that are just anime clips set to music, or are actual music video segments, absolutely amazes me) or are absolute stupidity that masses somehow enjoyed, and not for any explainable reason. Funny to many, sure, but not to me.
Basically, YouTube became a haven for various types of content. Vine pretty much forced this one style by its nature. Sure, I enjoy stupid content, and there are some vine clips that I enjoy, but overall, the service never appealed to me, and just got worse and worse as time went on.
Am I being harsh here? Sure. Don’t like it? Oh well. It’s a video sharing service that brought nothing to the table. I won’t miss it. Get over it.
One other thing I wonder about is the Xbox One Twitter App, since all it is is a vine viewing service, basically, once this is over and done, what new content will it show? I guess nothing but the occasional live video. Certainly not tweets, since for some reason they don’t think that’s important in a Twitter app.
…Geeze, Twitter, as a company, is going downhill fast, isn’t it?
For what it’s worth, here is an example of what Tara Strong did with vine:
Lastly, I present you with the one vine that I actually enjoyed.