Twitter killing Vine video service makes the internet worse

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/28/twitter-killing-vine-video-ser.html

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I tried to use Vine, but guess I wasn’t “young” enough to get it. Snapchat and Instagram have sort of taken it’s place.

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Roger That!

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Same here. I don’t do the internet on my phone. And GET OFF MY LAWN!

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Well, start your own Vine. With Blackjack. And hookers.

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Perhaps the saddest thing is that suddenly all these Vines are now playing in my browser with minimal effort, which is far more than I can say for Twitter videos.

That said, I agree that with Twitter video around, there isn’t much point to Vine anymore – except that Twitter is clearly quite horrible.

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I wonder why they don’t sell it.

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I feel like Twitter doesn’t even consider it a problem—they’re probably spending every waking hour trying to crack the problem of how to make money on the damn thing.

Actually, curious: have they tried a user-donations model? “If everyone reading this gave Twitter five dollars…”?

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I was never a direct traveler in the world of vines, though the Youtube Vine “best of’s” were fun. It did seem like a cool “Haiku of online video” thing with a nice balance of creative constraint and freedom. The claim of “No Brands” is definitely not true, though, as popular Viners(?) definitely monetized by creating relationships with brands. Compared to the rest of the brand-saturated and -obsessed social media sphere, though, it probably did feel that way in comparison.

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“Twitter killing Vine video service makes the internet worse”

So… the Vine video service is “Twitter killing”? And by killing Twitter, it’s making the internet worse?

File under Badly Written Headlines.

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What’s a “killing vine?”

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This was always one of my favorite vines

It was amazing how much funny you could fit in such a short amount of time.

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I like your thinking!!

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This is…

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I never understood people complaining / eyerolling at the 6 second length of Vines. Just like the arbitrary 140-character limit of Tweets, the limitation spurs creativity. Figuring out how to tell a tiny story or express a joke or idea in six seconds generated far more interesting ideas than if they’d been unlimited length (or a minute or whatever). I’ll miss Vine.

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Came to say the same thing. And I’ll second Rob’s assertion that the service was used primarily by PoC. C’mon Dorsey, get it together. Twitter is such a great service when it’s not flooded with those tired-ass racists/bullies that I don’t want to see it go under because of them.
In fact, what’s the chance Twitter goes under, they “open” their source code to all, progressive programmers get in there and tweak the system to root out the haters, and then kittens and puppies for everyone!!!

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Zero. Literally actually zero.

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The magic of Twitter isn’t in the code (although that’s not trivial), it’s the community. There have been (and still are) Twitter competitors. Nobody uses them because nobody uses them. Some have achieved moderate success, the most notable is probably ello.

Twitter has ok revenue. I think it was about $2.2 billion last year. The problem is expenses. For some reason, they have between three and four thousand employees. They probably need to get rid of 50-90% of those people.

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I’ve never understood what a typical Twitter employee does all day – watch Twitter work? They most certainly aren’t moderating it actively or answering moderation requests on the part of people being abused or bullied, which seems to me to be why Google or Disney passed on buying them.

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…which explains why they’re so resistant to the idea of (more) human moderation.

Meanwhile, when they do make cuts, it raises shitstorms like this one.

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