What the end of Vine means for creativity on the internet

Vine, one of the internet’s most creative social platforms, shuts down today, leaving behind a legacy of comedy, magic, music, vulgarity and the inherent frailty of our social media obsessions.

Similar to its parent company, Twitter, Vine couldn’t grow beyond its roots. There were millions of users but only a fraction of them created the content that drove Vine into public consciousness.

I was one of them, though I could never post at the pace of my peers on the platform, and I wasn't equipped to ride the wave of celebrity and wealth that, for a brief time, came with Vine success.

Vine creation became big business. Wine aficionado and internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuck launched a business around it, GrapeStory. Vine stars inked deals with major brands, making a living off their Vine videos even as the service itself couldn’t figure out how to make a real business of the platform.

With bad news comes a desire to blame. Maybe Twitter didn’t promote Vine enough. Of course, Twitter has its own struggles -- 2017 will be a pivotal year for the company, and it probably didn’t need the baggage of solving Vine, too. And, in truth, few social platforms, even the most creative ones, really work in the long term. Snapchat is strong now, but it faces formidable competition from Instagram, which seems capable of duplicating every single feature almost as soon as Snapchat delivers it (can Instagram i-Glasses be far behind?).

This clear-headed assessment of Vine’ demise doesn’t mean I don’t mourn what we’re losing.

As I write this, millions of Vines are disappearing with the mobile app. They will live on at the Vine.co web site, but you won’t be able to like or even share them (You can still copy and paste the URL and Vine video embeds will continue to function on third-party web sites). It will be an archive, a library of video you can visit when you want to remember.

But visiting a website and using an App that served as both a creation tool and a social platform are, obviously different things. No more scrolling through minutes and minutes of six-second hilarity from Will Sasso, King Bach or Chris D’Elia, mind-bending magic from Zach King or beautifully rendered animations from Pinot. No more feeling inspired and creating your own Vine idea based on something you saw in your feed.

There will be no more Vine stars. Shawn Mendez literally started his career singing in six seconds at a time to launch a multi-platinum career. They’ll still have YouTube, though I can’t remember that last breakout viral star from Google's video platform.

When Vine announced the shutdown late last year, there was virtually no protest from the Vine community, which had already quietly migrated to Instagram. The Facebook-owned app doesn’t have the same tools as Vine, but the audience is larger and, without the six-second limit, the creative possibilities are even greater.

And there will be a way for Vine veterans to bring the app's flavor to other platforms: Vine will live on in a new app, called Vine Camera. If you already have Vine installed, Vine Camera, which launched today in the App Store and Google Play, plays Invasion of the App Body Snatchers and just takes over.

Functionally, it is a duplicate of Vine, but without the social network. Instead, you save the videos you created to your Camera Roll or share them to, naturally, Twitter. It retains all the powerful animation tools Vine built up over the years after belatedly discovering that people wanted to use its tap-and-hold-to-record tool to make animations.

Those were my favorite tools; I used them to create hands-free product unboxings. Over time, I added third-party equipment like lenses, tripods and various other analog tools to create smooth and interesting animations. The great thing about the Vine community is that people always had tips for you. I remember Drew and Jonathan Scott (The Property Brothers) telling me, that, for comedy videos, it made more sense to record the segments with the iPhone’s regular Camera app and then edit in iMovie before uploading.

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This morning I did, as Vine recommended, download all my Vines (I created over 800). I found the best of them and created a 4-minute silent movie. Watching all that six-second creativity makes me proud and a little misty.

In Vine’s waning hours, Viners posted dozens of entertaining goodbyes and even launched a #PostYourDrafts movement, encouraging Viners to upload unfinished work. They reminded me of movie outtakes.

This last brief, inspired burst, however, just makes me sad. Vine as an idea is dead. The word "Viners" will wither into obscurity. It will be a footnote in internet history, there to remind us of the limits of a content platforms, a reminder that there will always be few creators and endless consumers. For the creative platform to survive it must scale in a massive way and then leverage that scale for profit. Vine could only solve half of that equation. Other platforms, which require less creativity and more sharing have an easier time. I doubt we’ll ever see something like Vine again.