Vine: Six seconds of fame

It's 2012 and Twitter is at the Red Hot Center of Culture. We had an election in 2012, Obama won again. There was an Olympics in 2012. Hurricane Sandy happened in 2012, and all of those things had one important thing in common, which is that everybody wanted to tweet about them. All day, every day. But Twitter also just bought an app that might turn out to be even more important. It's called Vine, and it lets you make and share videos six seconds at a time. They loop forever, and they're going to change the way people think about content on the internet. From the Virgin Vox Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today we are talking about six seconds at a time, Live Vine Matter, and Why It Died. Stay tuned. The world moves fast. You work day, even faster, pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot is your AI assistant for work. Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash M365 Co-Pilot. This usually shocks people. I have run 27 marathons plus a few ultra marathons, all while fueling my body with plants. Yes, I get plenty of protein. I'm Robin Adson, VP of Fitness Programming and Head Instructor at Peloton, and this week on my podcast, Project Swagger, the fundamentals of a plant-based life with nutritional takeaways for you to apply to your own life, no matter what your preferred diet is. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Let's talk Vine. We have a crew here to talk Vine. Sarah John is here. Hi, Sarah. Hi. Mia Saddo is here. Hello. And Marina Galparena is here. Hi. Hello. This is, I would say, this was a hotly contested episode that everyone wanted to be on. Turns out everybody has like really strong feelings about Vine, which I'm very excited about. You all have like real Vine credentials, but Marina, you in particular, just casually dropped when I was like, we're doing a thing about Vine. You were like, oh, I did a gallery show of Vines. Explain this to me. Yeah. This was like 2013, and Postmaster's Gallery invited me and Kyle Chica to co-curate a show of something. And we're like, okay, we're going to show Vines. And at the time, and I've told you this, this was the best version of Vine, you could not upload a pre-edited video. Right. You had to record live. So we had some developers do a backend that you could do that. And that's how we sold a Vine for $200. But we had 14. You made more money than most Vines. This was at the moving image fair. So it was like a big deal for us, but yeah, it was 2013. You were like early to it too. That was like cool kid Vinaire. Yeah. I love this for the golden year. Yeah. Mia Sarah, were you guys Vines? We sort of covered this journalistically, but were you like Vine people? I was on Vine. I remember one of the first brushes with like, it wasn't even virality, but the feeling of putting something on the internet and people other than your friends seeing it. I made a Vine where I was like at my local target, and I was in the magazine aisle, which I don't even know if that exists anymore. But there were like, you know, people in magazine and the news magazines. And I took a stack of special like teeny-bop one direction themed magazines where the whole issue was one direction. I made a Vine where I was just putting the one direction magazines in front of all the news. And it got like, yeah, because I was obsessed with one direction. And it got like a couple dozen likes. And I was like, this is crazy. This is so cool. Yeah, that's like, that everybody has that first brush where you're like, I could be a star. Yeah. This is my call. Yeah. Like I existed in the internet, not just to my friends, but like to the general public. I also feel like putting one direction magazines in front of other things is like a surprisingly good Vine bit that would have worked for a really long time. I wasn't thinking like Hussle, you know, I mean, I was not rising and grinding it. Yeah, that's, I mean, that came later. Yeah, I understand. Sarah, what about you? Muscle ended like pop culture clips. All right. So it's like there'd be like some scene in Star Trek where they're fighting off a virus and what they're talking about makes absolutely no sense. And then I'd like to do a little clip just for my like cybersecurity pals. But like mostly I just watched Vines, right? I watched a lot of Vines. Yeah. They were great. I was trying to think back and I have, I don't have memories of like sitting on Vine the way that I sit on TikTok. But then we were all going back through old Vines and preparation for this. And oh my God, are there a million Vines that I remember? Like beyond things that I even remember being Vines, they were just, they're just like things in the world now that I was like, I must have spent way more time on Vine than I realized in those years. Yeah. So really like that year. Turned out to be. Yeah. I don't remember sitting there watching Vines. But yes, as we were going through it, I was like, I must have seen so many Vines. Like I must have spent a lot of time on this platform, even though I have no memory of sitting there, spending time on this platform. Yeah. Which is weird, given what we're about to talk about the disaster that was this platform that any of that is still true is kind of wild. So we're going to do this kind of in two pieces because I think there's still like the Vine story as a company and as a product that is actually like pretty short and pretty messy and pretty straightforward. So we're going to talk through that a little bit. And then we asked you guys to just bring some Vines that you thought were like cool or important that we want to talk about. And I think frankly, that is the best way to talk about Vine is through the Vines and not through like the company and the product, which is as we're about to find out, mostly just a disaster. So the story starts in 2012, which is earlier than I thought actually. This feels like we're doing the like vertical looping video thing. This all feels very recent. 2012 is like kind of a long time ago. Companies founded three co-founders, Russ Yusupov, Don Hoffman and Colin Crowell. Their original plan, which is I don't think I think I knew before, was basically like what if Twitter, but video, one of the reasons they landed on making it so short and so straightforward and so simple was they just like wanted it to be a casual way to share stuff like Jack Dorsey's whole like I just want to do status updates thing. That was the original Vine plan, which I thought was sort of fascinating, which also sort of explains why Twitter would have just instantly bought this company. They hadn't launched. They had no, I don't even know how Twitter like came to be aware of Vine, but they found the company in 2012 and they sell to Twitter in 2012 for $30 million, which is sick. And that is my new app plan is make an app. Don't launch it. Sell it for a lot of money and just dip. So kudos. So all this happens. The app launches January 24th of 2013 and by April, it had 200 million users. This thing just like exploded. It's thing. Well, actually, we should talk about this. There were a bunch of things that like sort of made Vine, Vine a bunch of different like constraints. One of them was the six seconds. They only let you made six second videos. One of them was the loop. And one of them at the very beginning was that you couldn't edit or shoot in other apps like you were saying, Miranda, you like had to basically shoot the thing once and upload the thing that you shot. You could pause, but it was like a touch and go thing. Yeah, wait, can you describe actually how this worked? I have no memory of making early Vine. It's like, I think you held the digital button and it would record and then when he stopped, it would stop recording. So then you set up for your next shot and recorded again. So it was very like Jonas Meckas, who's a of a God full maker who shot these things on super eight. I was remembered. And over the course of years, it would be short clips. So I did that over the course of my day. Maybe I pioneered the get ready with me. I don't know. I think you did. I think we're given that to you officially. First of all, the only thing I remember about the interface at the very beginning was it like there was no record button or anything. It was like the whole you pressed anywhere on the screen. Right? And it would take a video. That's very clever. So I have a clip from 2013 of two of the founders talking about why they picked the time. But then I want to know if y'all think the time is actually the thing that made Vine, Vine because I've come to think that maybe it's not. Let me just play this clip for you. So one of the questions that we get all the time is why is it six seconds? And there actually isn't like a great answer to why it's six seconds. Please don't answer that question. So we started at five seconds and we went all the way up to 10. And what we found was that like the quality of the video didn't really change at all. But it became a real pain in the butt to watch a 10 second video. It was hard to upload too. So we went back down to five, but a lot of people were saying like this isn't enough time. I can't like capture what I want. And what we realized was it wasn't an issue of the length per se. It was an issue of people having a really hard time gauging what they had left based on just the progress bar. So what we did was we had the progress bar represent six seconds. But we let you shoot past the six seconds up to 6.5. And as soon as we did that, the quality of that last cut on these videos people were making one up like like 10 times. It was so much better. So my thing is I watched this clip and immediately I'm like, oh, they had no idea what they were talking about. There's no plan anywhere in that. Sounds like a lot of bullshit. But yes, they they land on I guess six and a half seconds, which I had never heard before. Like it's good hack six and a half seconds. But to me, like looking back, I kind of feel like the thing where the video just kept looping was as important to what made Vine Vine as the six seconds. Yeah, because you would watch things, watch for different things every time you watched it. And it felt sort of endless and way more detailed the second time around and then the third time around of watching it. And I feel it's interesting like so many of these things that are very used now in TikTok feel very Vine related. Like the way that, you know, I think in TikTok a lot of things like end on a place right before the beginning. And so you kind of encourage you to keep watching it. And Vine did that in a very organic way. I think because it was so short and people were cramming so much stuff into that brief moment of time. Yeah, I think that was when I remember first seeing all the comments about like praising the perfect loop. Everybody was like looking for the thing where you can't even tell where the video ends and begins. It just kind of goes forever. And it's like I still see those everyone some while. They're like trying to nail the perfect, viney loop. And very end had to be slightly cut off. And that's something you see on TikTok now. Like totally. Just like maybe should have been seven seconds. I don't know. Right. Like the every end is like slightly cut off and every beginning is slightly cut off. Like right at the end of the millennial pause. Right. It begins on Vine. It also sort of rewards like the best thing about the very good YouTube videos early on. Right. Where when you see a very good YouTube video, like the super early ones that are like a couple minutes long, you always want to play it again. Right. And it's like the fact that Vine automatically loops it. Like it creates that incentive, I guess, to make something that's very watchful again, again and again. Yeah. And it feels like when it's six seconds at a time, all of the like view numbers turn out to be lies. That's it. Because everyone watches everything 100 times by accident. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've had this experience so many times recently on TikTok. We're all like started TikTok. And then I put it, I put my phone down while it's playing. And then I come back a minute later. And I've watched this video 10 times. And it's like, well, you're welcome. I guess for all of the viewers here that I'm doing for you. So anyway, so this, this all takes off. And I think pretty quickly, it started to get like a little more sophisticated. I think that I had forgotten about was that at the beginning, you couldn't use your front facing camera on Vine. And that one of the big things they did was just turn that on for people because it like, it sort of makes sense. I guess like if you're just, if your idea is just like let people take pictures of the world that they're in to share them, you have the back camera, but all anybody wants to do stick videos of themselves. And so making that turn very important. And like really like you can see the inflection point in Vine when all of a sudden you could turn the camera on yourself as you're recording. Also, a thing that I had forgotten was how quickly everybody else started doing Vine. Like Instagram puts video into Instagram in 2013. Snapchat stories, 2013. It's like Vine hits big really fast. And all of a sudden everybody else just copies Vine and puts it into their platform. And Twitter, there's probably a nicer way to say this, but Twitter at this time was like a badly run company full of bad executives who didn't know how to run companies. And Vine is like doing well sort of despite itself, but even internally there's a sense of like we don't have a plan, we don't know what we're doing. Nobody's making any money. We're like culturally very important in all of this is a mess. And Vine was like right dead center of that. And I feel like this was also like peak Twitter in terms of like how important it was in the world. This was it was it was everywhere. This was I think like the Sully Sullenberger era of like news was happening all of this is like Twitter was the center of everything in so many ways. But didn't know how to make enough money to like rub two nickels together. So all this keeps happening keeps growing everything's going fine. And then in mid 2015 is when stuff starts to get kind of wild. So at this time there's this big group of viners who all live together. This story is really like it's it's both like very cool and kind of annoying. Like a bunch of viners all moved to LA because they all wanted to get famous and get rich and be in Hollywood movies. And this was back like very much in the era where the goal was get famous on the internet and then go on television. And that is like this is sort of the end of that dream where like now I don't think most creators are spending a lot of time thinking like how do I get an NBC pilot. But they were then. And so all these folks are like we're going to move to LA and have like traditional Hollywood careers. And they all move into this one apartment complex at 1600 vine in LA. And a bunch of them have described that as like a call their replacement for their college experience. It sounds like a nightmare. It's like an absolute nightmare. Every time I read this I'm like no you should have gone to college. It would have been much better. I know reading the like dispatches from I guess this proto high post I was like it sounds horrible. Yes. Like imagine being their neighbors. I would lose my mind. Awful. Yeah it didn't remind me of all of the stories. There was a run in like kind of throughout this whole phase where one delightful LA news story was like Logan Paul through a party and all of his neighbors are pissed off about it was like this would just come up over and over and I loved I love those stories and I missed them very much. Anyway so this group gets together and it's they become like the sort of cartel at the top of vine. And a thing that I think was important about vine was there was no algorithm. There was just your feed of who you followed and then there was the popular page. I like deliberately never spent time on the popular page. I think because by the time I got to vine it was all of these people on the popular page and like King Batch was never my vibe really. I don't know about y'all. No shade if you love King Batch back in the day but not for me. But anyway so these folks there's like 20 of them living in this complex at one point and they all basically come together and figure out that if they work together they can own vine. And so they start re-vining each other to sort of artificially manufacture popularity for everybody else. They are making these videos together and they tag each other and there comes this like big heated debate over who gets tagged first in a video versus who gets tagged second. This stuff is like again waking nightmare of like being a person on the internet. But this is what they figure out. And so they're like they're at a point where if you get the 10 most popular people on vine together they can control everything because there's no algorithm because vine itself has no mechanism to be like well no we're going to show you new stuff anyway. They could just flood the system they were all over the popular page and as it turned out they were also making a lot of like I don't know really like soft moroc is probably the nicest way I can put it. It was a lot of like really like crass sexist off-road low brow comedy stuff. Yeah. Was like the biggest stuff on vine at this point. Yeah I have no memory of like watching that kind of content. I guess probably because I didn't follow them and my friends like a lot of the way that I found vines were word of mouth a friend being like did you see this thing and then they show it to me after school or something. But it was really weird to go back and see that the pervasive culture I guess just for the general population was this stuff that like just objectively sucks really bad. Like it's not good. No it's rough and there's a there's a lot of like really like just straightforwardly objectionable stuff that was at the very top of vine for a really long time. Yeah. And that's not a vine specific thing that remains true everywhere on the internet. But it was so centralized at the top of vine because these people were like okay if we refine each other if we if we promote each other all the time we can make sure that all anybody sees is the 20 of us that live in this one apartment complex together. So they they get very big. They keep getting bigger. They're growing and growing and growing and it turns out vine hates this. Like they hate it. They hate it for a lot of reasons. One is because they feel like their platform has been sort of usurped by a bunch of people who are a making stuff that the vine executives don't like. There's just like if the people who worked at Twitter and all of this stuff were not trying to make a thing that was for these people to make the horrible low brow comedy and that's all anybody ever saw. So the vine executives start doing things like blocking stuff from the popular page that should have been on there. This becomes this whole like conspiracy theory that's going on and people who work there have since confirmed that they were like manually curating this page. But this is like a story as old as the internet. Like I don't know if any of y'all remember dig but like back in the dig days people would get really pissed because they'd be like oh my thing has a lot of digs but it's not on the popular page and this thing with less digs is on the popular page and they'd like spin out about it on the internet. This becomes a huge thing on vine and again it's the people who are the maddest about this are the most popular people on the platform. So this like becomes a huge giant mess and also vine again because Twitter was a bad company run by people who did not run companies just didn't take care of its creators at all. Like there was no sense that like we need a system to help the people who are making stuff for our platform. And part of me is like okay it was early this was early in the creator days but part of me is also like hey this is very obviously a thing you should do. And also at this point like YouTube was already doing a very good job of taking care of creators and had revshare stuff going on. And so it's vine I don't know that to me is like the biggest own goal of all of vine is just like somebody probably should have just like made a phone call to these people and been like hey we're here what do you need. It's also like I don't know if doing that would have made Vine more fun. Like because as I remember it Vine felt like very very amateur in a delightful way at least the vine that I was on and the people I guess were this cartel of I think mostly men you can correct me if I'm wrong but they were sort of aspiring towards something else that at least for me that never represented Vine like the production value for some of these like like the King Batch videos and stuff I was like who who watched this like who was it like 10-year-olds you know I don't know. I think the answer is always 10-year-olds on every platform everywhere it's usually 10-year-olds. Very true but it's like I don't know if any of the people who made my favorite vines that I still laugh at would have even wanted that sort of like creator path I don't know it's really interesting. Yeah it's it's a weird I don't know did you all have this perception too that there was like I feel like Vine more than most felt like it was sort of two completely different things because especially at the time it was really big there was this group of like honest to God famous people a lot of whom you know lived in this place in LA but then there was the rest of Vine which felt kind of like you're saying completely different it was like there were two totally separate platforms inside of Vine. Well it was more like found art when less like an influential and influencer and because it was paired to peer basically like you said that it's just send you recommendations and that's why there was no algorithm showing you something you stared and horror for three seconds forever now it was more organic and it stayed in the circle of people that like that and it was it was kind of close to the original intent of like let's capture moments and time from your day but sometimes something brilliant would happen and it was yeah that was my Vine. Yeah that's the right Vine. It seems like that was also a time it was very like it was important to have a couple of friends who were like pretty good at Vine because if you had somebody who was good at re-vining stuff into your feed and also making their own stuff like that was the sweet spot all of my friends were trash at Vine and so I had I had no one doing this job for me which was maybe why I didn't get as much out of Vine as other people did. But anyway so this house is going on it's growing they're starting to fight with Vine more and more and then at the end of 2015 this all comes to a head and a bunch of Vine people actually go to this apartment complex and they like sit in a big conference room and they're like okay we're here let's all be friends let's talk it out and Taylor the Rens who wrote a book about a lot of this has a great chapter about all the Vine stuff and one of the things she wrote is that a bunch of people in that room were basically like using it as a therapy session they just like needed somebody to yell at about all of their feelings about Vine which tracks it's what it is to be an internet creator it's like it just made me think of all the people who make the like why I'm mad at YouTube video now just to get the attention from somebody at YouTube they're just like I just want to know you're thinking about me which is you know sure great but they also wanted money and this this is the moment I would argue that Vine started to die so what they demanded was this it was a group of I believe 19 people who were sitting in this room and had like joined hands to make this fight together and they wanted a million dollars a year to make three vines a week now is their pitch and so the vine people leave going okay a million dollars a year for the 19 top viners to make vine three vines a week not a terrible deal and then they go and they read the contract proposal and it's actually a million dollars per person per year to make three vines a week and again I just it cannot emphasize enough that Twitter didn't have anybody and was not a good business and so basically they they were just like well no we can't do that we can't pay you directly to make content in this way which to me is actually there's such an interesting like alternate future that happens here if Vine says yes to this yeah because ultimately like really 19 million dollars a year for the most popular content on your platform you could probably sit there and make a business case for it in a lot of ways if you're a very different company than Twitter was the time but then the one of the things they were worried about was that if they say yes to this then all of the celebrities who are on Twitter who have big following a start can start to be like oh pay me to tweet and that if they if they had said yes to this I think the like reverberations out through the creator world would have just been insane yeah this feels like an era too that was like a lot of people were purely doing it for the likes yes because there was nothing else to pay you in and there was also no promise of like now I think people you know post for the likes for a while with the idea that eventually they can catapult it into getting brand deals or have ads placed on their content or whatever but back then I think they're truly wasn't there the currency was attention and the dopamine hit of like getting a heart or whatever and so I don't know I still think it's like weird to think that that was such a novel idea of like paying your top creators to post exclusively or even non-exclusively on the platform to keep it alive but and because now it feels like well duh but back then it's like I don't know but I've been still like you look at what you know YouTube does now and it's it's it's not it's a more sort of straightforward business arrangement but it's not quite as simple as like I'm saying you to make three videos a week and if that was a if we had set that precedent ever you've got to figure anyone who is sufficiently popular shows up in his like I would like mind yes and it changes the whole economics of this for well it changes the type of workers they are to like totally yeah they become like vying staff yeah yeah like I like right it's really weird yeah yeah and like this is also sort of we're coming off of a period where all of these platforms had a very adversarial relationship with the content industry right they had a very adversarial relationship with the studios with the record industry like it's just it turns them into a different beast what like totally um yeah like the idea of paying these people would have felt like anathema almost yeah even though it probably would have saved vying it would probably save vying it would have also changed the internet forever yeah yeah it is it's like that that meeting is so many different things could have happened after that meeting but anyway so Twitter says no and then immediately all of the winers get really mad and spend months posting videos basically saying follow us on other platforms and at this point like it was really it was Facebook Instagram and YouTube were kind of the places to go and people went and they told them to go and I think more than not all these folks ended up on YouTube and YouTube had creator programs it had revenue sharing programs and it was like it had just professionalized in the way that vying did not and so all these people start to be like we're out follow us on these other platforms like angrily loudly leaving vying for months at a time and again they're very popular so they can do things like make tons of people watch this and so then the the smaller creators see this and they start to say oh okay well we're gonna leave too because if it's not for them it's not for us and it just like this thing just immediately starts to bleed uh and meanwhile vying continues to like flail uncontrollably in every direction at one point it launched a vying kids app it's crazy I didn't know that I already is vying kids I have no other information for you other than that but that's the thing that happened at one point you could post videos up to 140 seconds um but but through all of this it's just too late it's incredible they did all of this without Elon Musk taking over like it's like yeah yeah it turns out you can you can run your own company into the ground without a help if you want to and so for a while twitter starts thinking about bringing vying sort of more directly into twitter I think they had tried for a long time to run them as two separate things I think you can actually debate whether that was the right or wrong call but then as vying starts to fall off all of the people started like think about how do we sort of merge these two things and turn vying into like twitter video because at this point again video is like ascendant everywhere on the internet it's very clear this is where we're headed vying got a lot of things right and there is a sense of like okay we're just gonna move all this stuff together and it's gonna work but that didn't really come together and it pissed everybody off again because now everybody's like oh you don't even see this as its own platform this is just a feature of twitter so pleads more users it's just keeps happening instagram gets better youtube gets better vying just continues to sort of collapse uh meanwhile twitter's business circa 2016 not great ironically it got better after that because trump got elected and there was this big spike in twitter usage and like its relevance again but tough times at this point and so october 27th of 2016 which is like a week before the election wow which is sort of wild vying announced that it was shutting down but that it was gonna leave this thing called the vine archives open so that you couldn't make new vines but you could see all vines and then even the vine archives closed in 2019 and that is the whole story of vine it it burned so insanely bright for so much less time that i realized yeah like if you had been like how long is vine cool i would have been like i don't know four or five years it was like 18 months yeah that's wild that's wild yeah and i think i don't i don't know to me it's going back and being like okay the number of sort of almost correct ideas they had at the very beginning were like they they got most of it right right like the mobile video thing we can make it easy to consume we can make it easy to upload we we're gonna give you like more and more tools over time we're gonna make this a social thing we're gonna let people talk to each other re-vining was big and new and not something other platforms had like they got a lot of things right uh and just in in classic twitter fashion just couldn't make anything of it ever again but i think none of that is actually vines true legacy right i think vines actual legacy is the people and the vines uh and so we're gonna spend most of the rest of the show just talking about vines so let's quickly take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're just gonna play a lot of vines we'll be right back hey carousel swisher here i want to let you know that box media is returning to south by south west in austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast join us from march 13 through the 15th for live tapings of today explained tefie talks prof g markets and of course your two favorite podcasts pivot and on with carousel swisher the stage will also feature sessions from brine brown and adam grant marques brownley deeply vivian two and robin arzhan it's all part of the box media podcast stage at south by south west presented by odoo visit vox media dot com slash sks sw pre register and get your special discount on your innovation badge that's vox media dot com slash sx sw to register really you should register we sell out and we hope to see you there and bastard rom a manual served as president obama's chief of staff in administration that had to deal with its fair share of global conflicts he dealt directly with israel's prime minister and thought plenty about the threat from a wrong but a manual told me that the pace of action from this president in the middle east is giving him whiplash in 15 months this president has taken military action against eight countries i just just in fifty now we got three more years to go in fifteen months i ran twice but you have syria ira samalia venizowela you uh... i'm losing uh... not gary to they explained in your feet every week day and on saturdays too so i think the best way to talk about why vine actually mattered in the world again it burned very bright is just to play a bunch of vines and so we ask all three of you to bring two vines that you think are great or important or just funny or memorable or whatever and uh we're just going to sort of talk about why vine mattered through some vines does that good that's great all right we're just going to go around the table here sarah europe first uh do you have any preamble for the first one you'd like to play here okay this one is neither important nor like this one is memorable for me this is i think emblematic of what vine was in the sense that there's something that you saw and it just stuck in your head and it's there forever now i will say there's something magical about the six seconds in that way like there's nothing else that feels that way to me now in that like the sort of short clip that you can like remember the whole thing of the second time you see it very powerful in an in a way that nothing replaces now all right so let's let's play this one here we go it's just a woman dancing with her cat and it just loops forever it feels so much longer than six seconds i know like a world is a world and the cat is really cute and the music loops perfectly it's very smooth uh yeah you just sit there and you keep watching you just keep watching and i remember like every detail of those pajama pants the the cat the cat's belly like for some reason it's just embedded in my brain forever and i feel like that's fine there's all these little vines like i think one of my favorite things about that vine and that viner is that that's a south korean viner um she all of her other vines like the ones where she speaks nothing is in english when that vine blew up it blew up mildly she was like she had posted a vine that was like look i don't know why uh english people are following me now welcome i don't speak english and like she said this in english and it's like a little bit broken accent it and then she goes on to continue posting in korean like 100% in korean on bothered queen on bothered and i had like friends who were fans of that one vine and so periodically i would update them on new content that she had posted translating the vines for them um and that was just a thing that happened for a while love it yeah so you just made me think of one of the other things that i think vine sort of nailed as a format is this like wordless globally accessible video like i was just looking up uh kblayam who eventually became one of the like huge stars on tiktok just making videos where you would just like silently make fun of other people's videos and you would just point at stuff and there's this like language to these videos that sort of only ever mattered once you got to the internet and anyone anywhere with no context whatsoever could see it that all of these things started to figure out in really cool simple ways um alright that's a good one let's do uh mea your first one do you want to set this up for us this man with a crispy cream hat i think it's a self shot video back at it again and he there there's no one in the crispy cream that i can see but apparently was very busy does this crazy tumbling pass of multiple back flips and at the very end his feet just mash the crispy cream sign and then it stops let's watch it sit back at it again at crispy cream okay so this this is one of the vines if if you hit not play this for me i never would have thought of it again exactly i was so mad when i was like oh my god how could i have forgotten because a friend sent it to me um like recently when i was prepping for this and i was like holy shit like this change the world truly i am obsessed with this vine it's so funny it's one of those perfect ones that you can watch it's like candy you can keep watching it over and over and over there's no setup there's no context who is this man why is he in crispy cream does he often flip here right like filming who's watching what happened after the video um it's i'm obsessed with it and it this was like the vine that i remember loving where it is slice of life but really weird slices of life um from a complete stranger you know nothing about them but they do or encounter something really weird and bizarre and suddenly you get to know about it um i actually there was a New York magazine article about this vine which like correctly identified it as the best vine ever and they found the guy they did some sleuthing and i loved the article because it gave you no more detail about why this happened he did not he was like yeah i loved to tumble and like i was in crispy cream and i i had someone film me and i was like you know what yeah yeah hell yeah um i yeah and they he did say that the sign in fact fell but he wanted to make it clear that he landed on his feet you you could he was like you saw me i landed on my feet um he ran away from the cops who had been called to the crispy cream um and then i think it was fine in the end but he again he did not explain why he was doing this um the back added again at crispy cream like that is now going to be now that i remember this video i am going to say this forever all the time every day it's like part of my vernacular yeah he is very good it's also such a viney vine like yeah i remember one of the things i was reading in prepping this was saying that it was like the the perfect vine comedy was not like six seconds of like set up punchline it was like set up subversion and then the video is over right and it's like you you set up a joke and then you do something insane underneath the joke and then the video ends yeah and it is like it causes that thing where your brain just goes what the and you have to watch it 25 more times and this is like the perfect version because there's a million things you could do at crispy cream that would be funny and one of them is not several back flips and then kick the sign out so good it's mean to do it was he aiming to kick this yes kick the thing uh no um magic which again i'm like so have you done this tumble before this a tumbling past before in this place yeah and does that mean his idea familiar with the crispy cream right was his idea just like i'm just going to do a sick tumbling pass at a crispy cream yes like that's not a good vine i know it's a bad vine it's so it's so so good it really like watching all the vines to similar to what you were saying david it reminded me that like combine with like the looping combined with like the audience combine with the six seconds it created a new language of humor and jokes that like i feel like people still rely on a lot it's this like there's a choppiness of tiktok there's this like weird setup and something completely different and you really don't need more than six seconds it's really true all right marina do you want to set up your first one this is mispronouncing words that you see at the store and other various locations very funny guy he is good pro no usin things and corrigu anthrop pull good joal risk kambi pro no usin things and corrigu take one do booty quay panel kio i don't even know how to say that normally pro no usin they're in cordu it's guitarist catechorus i can take a tour dooblay banana grains rump paje is this like the extended bird this is this is a bunch of different guys oh yeah i think he had a series pro no usin things and corrigu oh kashio kubakaki you sanery ruck a rady you don't have to put on some things and corrigu you to bat stew and grew pop jameo you go pro no i don't have to put on some kedi rogan p rocidi you bowl of titty so long to hug jiny here it's long titty pie pro no usin and corrigu i like y uh suckers wrapped in motos jalape nose cheater chan of hoonnie new shrawels krenna in tining and prudent rice crust fast yow dr poo poo jablis i feel like we're just watching this man slowly lose his mind jay next rump white t-at the watermelon this is the most beautiful thing in a sea yeah that's actually iconic yeah the watermelon thing at the end is really iconic i didn't know that was yeah the the watermelon thing is is like a moment in history uh why this guy why did this sick out here so i believe it's this chasmiff and i don't know uh english is my second language i'm an english major so i i was just i mispronounced a lot of things i still mispronounced things occasionally and seeing someone do it on purpose in such a creative way it was great um also the cuts are incredibly short like you barely have time to process it and you end up reading google exactly the way that he says as we because he's saying it as you're looking at it it's just a nice little uh a sochronic thing yeah he did do a lot of those in every single one yes and if you want to see it the intern archive has all of them archived and one compilation only 72 people have viewed it so far and you were all 72 yes yeah i like those one because it is uh a he does sort of slowly lose his mind over the course of it you can tell and that which is a very like you see this with every creator online who like figures out a thing to do they have to do that thing and then they have to do that thing slightly wilder every single time and by the 50th time you do your thing you have to just be completely unhinged from reality as you do it and that's what people want from you and and it's great and i think it's great but this is also like to me i think trying to do like original comedy or whatever way too much work this is like find a bit and just do it a million times it's perfect it's so good it's yeah it's very good sort of like the serial nature of it also you sort of see like the emergent creator quality coming out right it's like no longer like a six second version of america's funniest home videos like you're actually seeing sort of a nascent creator he's like building a thing and you go to con like there is one where he's just a con being french and correct ah i mean it's it's a perfect bit because you can do it with everything forever he's like he's making he's sitting does it with naval oranges in the grocery store it's very creative the world is your oyster yeah it's very fun i love that one all right Sarah what's your second one all right my second one goes down in political history uh it is Hillary Clinton doing a vine where it's just she goes what is it it's it's it's just it's just doing i'm just chilling and cedar rapids this is by a mile the cringiest one any of you picked let me just play it it's a picture of an iced tea i'm just chilling in cedar rapids yeah and then she's got her iced tea and it's got like a little like beer cosy on it that says chillery Clinton on it no i've never believed anyone less than Hillary Clinton using the word chillin it's and she's got the millennial pause in there like it's like it's it's really i feel it's magnificent because it sucks so much but at the same time it like captures like she understands vine in the sense that she understands that what it's like not a produced vine right it's like it's got that like gritty quality of not being very good um but then on top of that it's also not very good uh like so it's it's it is really it's up there with um Pokemon go to the polls in terms of like cursedness of pandering to the youth but doing it ineffectually was this a thing at the time like i have no recollection of whether this made any way it's because i did it yeah oh yeah no that one's this one is this one's deeply encoded in my brain right right up there with pokemon go to the polls like it's just yeah that's what i remember yeah this is of course turning an election season where facebook is like it was the facebook question right right it was the facebook election and then uh and then twitter emerged into prominence like in political discourse after that but like yeah so this is sort of maybe even a last gasp for vine yeah but for sure like this was maybe apex oh the dems are trying to have a digital strategy and it's not quite paying off right like where it really yeah you got to hope that vine is now in presentations about like how not to blow it with the kids that democrats play for each other every election so i mean it's like but what lessons can you even take away from it right like it's like so specific to a platform that is now dead yeah it's so specific to you know us like a candidate and her personality right and like also like the puns and references like don't really they're they're all dated now they weren't perfectly dated at the time but it's like yeah everything is just so specific to that moment yeah but one one thing i thought was it's really interesting in all of the vine research was like nobody who was famous outside of vine ever really figured out vine anyway then i feel like most other platforms are a mix of like like Justin Bieber has a lot of followers on instagram not because he's good at instagram but because he's just in Bieber you know what i mean but like there were a few sort of otherwise celebrities who became a thing on vine like Ariana Grande i think was big on vine but she was also like kind of already a pop star Justin Bieber was like kind of big on vine but again was already a pop star but like the almost everybody at the top of vine came out of vine which is just fat and there is like there's something to just like the language of this thing that no one knew and so like lots of people who started on vine have gone on to have like huge a list celebrity kinds of careers Sean Mendes is the example that makes me happy yeah there are a lot of other examples like the Paul Brothers that makes me less happy but there is like a who's who of youtube now like David Dobrik was a viner and that king was a viner uh and like just name after name after name but like no regular celebrity really figured out fine and wonder if that's just because there was no time to figure out vine for these folks like by the time everybody realized it was a thing it was dying i think it also like did require some creativity and a sense of humor because the like we i think when you see a vine that was really good you recognize it as like oh this hit but there wasn't really a formula unless you were doing the big elaborate like often kind of gross punchline joke scripted things but otherwise like how are you going to show the potato vine to a celebrity and be like so can you do this kind of thing you know what i mean like it's not it's nonsensical and that's what made it so great believe you know there were meetings where they played the potato vine and they were like what's our potato vine absolutely like the lays chips people i hope that they were on that but it's it's it's really hard to like appropriate or adopt it in a way that i think other platform you know it's like easy to be good at instagram um but not not so much for vine yeah me i think you're this is a good segue to your next one which i think did start a cultural phenomenon all by itself do you want to set this one up yeah i think that there is a good argument for why this is the most important vine period maybe so maybe some of the most important internet content period also um so yeah let's let's watch it and then i have a lot to say all right let's do it we in this beach for the get caught abraz on fleek dubba okay i kind of forgot about this for a minute until i watched it and i was like immediately this person her name is um kaelin newman and she's just sitting in her car reporting looks like her phone is like down on her lap yeah she's sitting in her car she's just like a normal girl um and makes this video where she gives the world a new term a new word fleek goes from her mind to being used by you know like denny's and stuff like brands by celebrities it becomes part of the way that we talk about aesthetics um and i think i really wanted to pick this one because i think it's important to say too that like so much of vine culture and by extension popular culture was made by young black internet users like black kids creative kids who were funny and interesting and this is just they there were interviews with Kayla as well being like this is just something i thought of when i was sitting in my car and then people at my mom's church asked her about it and being like have you seen your daughter's video wild um and you know unsurprisingly like she made no money from this um even though it was absorbed into sort of like the capitalist uh marketing machine and this feels like sort of the accidental virality accidental movement thing that um everyone is aspiring towards now people are trying to coin terms people are trying to coin concepts um in hopes that it becomes something and maybe they get a brand deal or they it can catapult them to having their own brand of yoga apparel or whatever it is launchables you know um but it just feels like such the such a beginning of like we are all we all just realized how big making stuff online and putting it online could be and i think it's like it really is like one of those things that i think should go and this is version history like this vine only is enough to like explain so much about the creator economy and the influencer industry in the way that um you know individual smart funny people collide with like giant machines the machinery of um you know PR departments it's like on fleek also just sort of enter the english lexicon it just did it became english and like there are a lot of moments like that in the history of english i don't know if we have like a single definitive moment where oh yes we filmed the moment this thing entered the english lexicon like we like have a lot of places where we're like oh we suspect this is the first time anyone use this in this way but no we know for sure this is the first time this is eyebrows on fleek this is on fleek i wrote on fleek and i i just it's like again we have creators especially in tiktok trying to do that but all of their phrases and catch phrases and stuff they're so long they're like long sentences right they're like long bits on fleek is like it's so short so concise you can almost imagine it being french right it's like on fleek or like it's like alfresco like something like that right like it just it fits it's in one meaning yes there's one interpret it's not up for interpretation there's no discord cycle about on fleek where there was for girl dinner whether it's like problematic or whatever you know what i mean no on fleek is means one thing it came from kailas brain and it was moved it was used to move a bunch of products that's what gets me yeah it's like this person made no money from this well what's funny now is like the this is a much less good example of the thing but like you look at like the the hawk to a tiktok phenomenon and it's like the line from i said a thing that a lot of people started repeating to i made money from that thing is now so straight and so simple she launched a podcast right like yeah this is what you do in the point you you wrote pull a bunch of people on the internet you like there were there were merch she got a trademark like it became all like you know what to do now when you go viral there's like a there is like a business and a playbook yeah and and like there's a no chance she was thinking about that making something like this and be when it happens we just didn't there were none of that infrastructure existed and by the time you even like see what's happening it it had gotten so big and so far away from her that she didn't get what she should have yeah for something like that whereas now it's like the minute you upload it's like i have filed 11 trademark applications and it's like we have business defied all of this in a way that i think makes it even when it works it makes it feel worse it feels worse than it almost defangs it also because like on fleek because that machinery wasn't there i do feel like it more casually entered the language but maybe it also speaks to the power of the phrase right whereas hawk toa that's the hawk to a girl you're not you're not thinking hawk toa something else when we say on fleek we don't necessarily think of her we think of eyebrows we think of eyebrows looking a certain way in a certain period it's a it's a style it's like a yeah like you can casually drop it and you you know what it is without someone's face flashing through your head because it's like it it is it is part of our language as opposed to a trademark yeah and i think it really it's interesting to see what happened with on fleek versus what happens with things like hawk toa or anything else that like people now there's sort of an expectation from people on the internet that you should own the creative work like this is a creative work and this is a thing of culture whereas back then it was just like oh i just heard this word i'm not interested really in where it came from or who came up with it and now like if this if on fleek happened right now there would be a million outraged fans of hers that were saying why aren't you crediting Kayla for on fleek which in some ways you know is good that we can acknowledge that this kind of language has not just cultural value but monetary value but yeah it's it's one of those things that is like so crazy that it happened the way it is because right now it's unthinkable that this would just like fly under the radar become absorbed into everyone's vernacular and then just like the person who created it disappears is it in like five million songs it's like it's just like everywhere like yeah like it's like it's it's wild like it just it happens and there's like like again this has happened in the history of English language like was like Peter Pan is the first time that the name Wendy appears like Wendy wasn't he wasn't a name whoa still don't know what Wendy is short for yeah it's a good one I like it all right Marina what's your second one okay so this is this is actually a nice transition because this is someone who did make money not dry kind of indirectly from the vine directly but this is by Nicholas Fraser I think you could make a case this is the most iconic vine it's up there it's a bob it's really good yeah why did you pick this one so complex track this guy down and I think the one brilliant inflection point in this vine is when he's like oh my god off beat so they're like how did you come up with that he's like I always say that that's just how I say oh my god so he got his personality in there just very pure and in 2022 he sold an NFT of this five for $96,000 it feels like it should be higher than that cheap what yeah and if it shouldn't be worth anything but also he should have sold that for way more yeah yeah one of it's worth now see if I can find it well he came up with it in the grocery store I think he heard like next close and from 1997 he's like start humming the new song and then just shot there's just a very pure creative process there so I really admire it and it sticks in your head I've used a screenshot left him acknowledging the lie and so many Slack communications throughout the years just like oh you filed that draft yeah stop stop fucking lie yeah I there's a there's a jay worth them tweet that's like about this like achieving escape velocity where like like it played like the song is playing in a car and then the whole neighborhood can hear it and everyone screams stop fucking lying at the right at the right moment like it's yeah yeah but yeah I think this became that like just to watch it this is not a particularly like it's a it's a very viney vine but I feel like there are a million vines that look and feel a lot like this one I mean it's that oh my god is like that's part of it but like I think that when did this one drop this was August of 2015 okay so people a lot of lying was happening in this period and so this was the correct reaction to everything like it was this was I think the year in which lies were beyond yeah this was 2015 into 2016 you had to just reply to everything with this because it was yes you wanted people to my god stop fucking lying yeah yeah and it works yeah it is like it it something like this hits over and over and over again and then the and then the screen the screen grab of the of the moment where he's going like that that's like you know so it turns into shorthand for the whole thing for the whole six seconds or whatever like yeah and then you can just keep you sending it to people on Slack like yeah it's true mean yeah you can hear his voice when you see just the still mm-hmm even if you don't like I feel like there aren't that many vines maybe that you could if you saw just a still yeah you would know what it's from other than the crispy cream one and I wrote on sleek which is why I picked both of them but he is like a character in and of it's himself like he's just like represents an entire emotion yeah it's it's a really good one all right I just want to play two more from our honorable mention list here and then we're gonna take a break but I feel like both of these just belong on the list of at least David's very favorite finds ever this one I think is maybe the best use of music as a as a vote as a visual cue ever on vine this is a bunch of umbrellas on the beach run this is just like a perfect line because it's it's it's just fundamentally it's just a video of a windy day on a beach and a bunch of umbrellas are just going down the beach because it's windy but it's the the perfect perfect perfect choice of music and it just makes the whole joke and it's it is delightful I love it very much it's so good all right we need to take one more break and then we're gonna go back and do the version in straight questions we'll grab back after decapitation strikes against Iran's leadership what can we expect next in the escalating war the big question is if there is going to be a next strong man in Iran what kind of strong man will that person likely be I don't think that there's going to be another powerful cleric supreme leader I'm John Feiner and I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the hosts of the Long Game a weekly national security podcast this week we sit down with Kareem Sajapur to discuss what to expect in this next phase of the war against Iran the episodes out now search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts our democrats their own biggest problem you know a party becomes defined by who their central figure who their quarterback becomes democrats haven't really anointed a effective quarterback since Barack Obama pretty much in this week the Atlantic staff writer Mark Levyvich joins me to discuss the state of the democratic party in which races to keep an eye out for this midterm election the episode is out now search and follow stay tuned with pre wherever you get your podcasts all right we're back so every episode we do the same questions about the product we're talking about today it's fine question number one what was the best thing about vine marina you go first it was the original version that you couldn't edit it that it was just one continuous slice of life and of the repeat I think you could make a pretty compelling case that vine got worse when they started allowing people to post I will keep saying that elsewhere yeah it lost the spontaneous element of it and even the fake spontaneous element of it I like it's a good answer me what do you think I think like the non monetizable element of it where there was just no commerce involved I think it started I started souring on it when like brands would commission vines and stuff and it was just like you're not supposed to be here like silence brand you know the don't post here um so when it was purely just feral children making videos I think Sarah what do you think I mean mensa riff off of marina's which is like I liked the brevity right like it's like you don't see that kind of dedication to brevity and platforms anymore and yeah I think that that was something special yeah I actually kind of think all three of those are sort of the same thing which is like by some mixture of sort of the culture of the place and the like actual construct of the app you just couldn't try that hard in a way that like really worked for vine that it was like it was not it was both gross and impossible to like do really great high production value work on that's also really hard to sell ads against six second clips no pre roll yeah just no little clip just subliminal messaging maybe yeah like a flash don't even see it yeah now I tend to agree I think the thing that ultimately I think cost it was a to your point there was probably never a way to monetize this in any useful way for anybody like divine shop I don't think would have worked in the way ads would not have worked but like there was something sort of beautiful about that mess that I think you probably couldn't do otherwise question number two what was the worst thing about fine Sarah you first on this one so maybe this was a good thing but maybe it was also a bad thing I'm not sure it the lack of algorithm I think like it it discoverability was really rough with fine like it had to sort of travel with a parallel platform in order to see the really good stuff essentially which for me it was Twitter so I would there was a lot of Twitter that was just in that yeah and like that worked for me but it's also like it means that this platform never is quite fully a platform for me right but on the other hand as soon as you bring algorithms into it you get a whole other can of worms like I don't even know we shouldn't even go down that rabbit hole right I think everyone who's watching this knows like oh as soon as you bring an algorithm into something you've got a whole other mess of issues I mean ironically we know exactly what it looks like yeah that's what happened right and it's uh yeah so it's like and then you know you've got the vine house gaming essentially the charts but that's because there isn't like a non-stop real of vines that like right that are that's algorithmically determined for people um but still like yeah I think that not having the algorithm meant that vine was doomed to not go anywhere and it also meant that discoverability suffered and maybe that was in some ways a good thing but I do think it hobbled the platform so good take I like that me oh do you think um I think a bulk of the humor was the worst thing about vine the sort of more I'm sorry but like the popular vineyards maybe were the worst thing because um there the the polishedness like it's very impressive but the some of the content is truly nasty um and you know we were talking about this before but I think it's interesting that in these compilations of best vines that content is never represented nobody is thinking about that stuff as being like the sort of peak of comedy on vine I actually went back and looked up some of these big vineyards um now and some of them have like just have kids and like post nice photos of their family but some of them are still doing that shit and that was really like profoundly sad to me because it feels trapped in this era that um in a lot of ways was like way worse you know culturally than things are now um well debatable but yeah I was like damn you're still doing the like uh girlfriend finds out she's the side chick videos like that's crazy to me yeah there's just longer and worse now yeah yeah and you're 35 which is insane I know that every time I see a video of somebody who just like you know snap cut to them getting pushed into a pool it's like oh you're just doing vines yeah yeah that's bad I don't like this very much yeah uh yeah my answer was also going to be all of the popular fuck yes who I think some of whom have gone on to have like better more interesting careers but just reading some of the names it's like Logan Paul and Jake Paul uh and David Dobrik and Nash Greer and Laylay Ponds and Brittany for like it's like a lot of them are not full of bad actually yeah right what fun is bad it's a it's a not wrong theory which is a real bummer uh Marina what's yours what's the worst thing about vine I tend to agree the top humor was quite bad and because it wasn't an I just wonder what would happen if that early on we combined the algorithm and the bad humor like how much they have necessarily or would it have suppressed it it's like it's unclear yeah because then you had your friends tell you hey this is a better vine it's like more of a personal recommendation which is something that I miss from social networks a lot because it's drowned out by the algorithm so yeah it isn't an interesting thing because even at that time like we we knew about algorithms right like like it would have been easy for vine instead of saying you know we're gonna manually curate the popular page so that it isn't just full of objectionable stuff that we hate to actually start to do some of the work to personalize this stuff to be like okay we're gonna make it so that it's not just these 20 people who get to control the entire platform and what everybody sees we're gonna start to like make some of these like that was work twitter was doing anyway on its own platform it's very weird that it didn't push on any of that stuff all right question number three would vine have been a bigger hit if apple it made it me yeah you go first I read this question and I was like what does this mean um I honestly have no idea but my take is that it's good that vine failed the way it did I think it's like that kind of like adds to the cultural pull and the appeal of vine is that we didn't really I mean in some ways we watched it with her but it wasn't this like slow decades long drag it just was like okay now we're not binding anymore yeah and that's kind of the like the cost of being early it's like really it was really striking to me how much of tiktok is just straight vine and how much musically was just straight vine in a way I mean there's like the the timing is not an accident right yeah vine died and then they just made another one yeah and that's how that's how musically started yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and I think it's good that vine did not become tiktok like that's I'm happy it's fair marine what do you think that apple has made vine work apple would never um yeah I don't think that I think like the best part of it is this like grittiness like the scruffiness like the real element of it so I don't I think having like a more polished platform would have taken away from that yeah that's kind of rye land to is apple is not famously great at knowing what's cool no and that would have they would have had a lot of like really lovely videos that no one watched vine would have looked like apple tv plus yeah they look great but there's not a lot going on yeah music by you too in a background yeah something that I think is actually interesting looking at these vines or they come is that they come from an era where it's like cheap and easy to make video where you can actually see stuff but it's not yet very good right whereas if you all of these were shot on like iPhones now it would just be a different quality there would be a different quality to it there'd be a different feel to it and I don't know if that would be good like I don't know I think they would be less funny I think there would be much less funny on iPhones today and so I think apple would not make vine work like I think that they would want it to look better than this and looking better than this would be worse yeah I completely agree um also apples history with social networks suggests that we are all correct about this uh-huh question number four if you could go back and make it yourself what would you do differently so we're installing the four of us as the heads of vine circa 2012 uh to me the answer is just don't sell the Twitter seems very clear start there uh but then I do I would like to have 30 million dollars so I don't know I'm torn what would you all do differently marina you go first leave the limitations I'm gonna keep saying this um I think there was a notion that not having a lot of features was what was getting it down but I think having limitations in your creative work is really freeing and maybe wouldn't have made any money but we would have gotten more good content out of it that way or more different content so yeah is it possible that the right answer is to make it like 15 seconds instead of six no absolutely not absolutely not be sure or sure okay I mean they told you how they figured it out it was yeah my answer is very compelling and full of just not too long not too short just right part of me feels like again like I think the six-second thing is like it's it is the reason so much of the things that work work but like I just keep him back to what you're saying about politicians like it is a very specific thing to do and it's like if if you'd make it 15 seconds and you give people do you give people more things to do or is that just not the point of vine yeah I mean it wasn't the point of vine like you would have to pivot vine like rather severely into almost like forking it into two different products that are combined on the same platform right where you have got the vines but then you got longer vines or whatever what would you call a longer vine yeah call them like trees or something and I'd be and it would be I don't know like like the way when TikTok you could get longer TikToks at some point right like in that that shifted the nature of the platform as well and it didn't make it worse I hate right nothing worse than when you scroll on to a TikTok and you're like oh my god this is 10 minutes long yeah I really don't like it it's not good yeah yeah it's not good yeah but it's like but at some point like in order to make this a thing that's more viable to bring I don't know politicians celebrities brands onto you do kind of need to fork it also to be able to sell ads against assuming that you turn this into an advertising business but really the number one thing that I would have worked on would have been music like it's like the music part I think is really key I think you can see it really early on with the vines too is that like there is something about adding music to the vine that changes things and makes it stick a little more and making that smoother more integrated with like rights and so on and so forth would have I think made this have sticking power in a way that it never did that's a good one yeah me any other thoughts probably unsurprisingly I would further suppress the most popular people that was a second choice yeah I would go the hype house um because that is a really weird legacy to have in terms of like the broader entertainment industry of like you just are home to a bunch of really loud boys who have bad jokes so I don't know maybe that's maybe that's me of me my other question was going to be if the four of us are running vine do we sign the deal with the vines so I would have I would have looked to monetize in some some like monetize for creators in some way but I don't like I don't think that it would have been those vines right like but at that point at the point at which they levied the ultimate and it was too late they had already hijacked right the platform right so you need to cut that off faster you need to stop that and you need to treat it as though it's like similar to like a spam problem essentially when someone has has figured your platform out to that degree like you've got a problem on your hands because what you've got is not what people actually want to see yeah they've they've figured out your charts and that's not the same as making good content but yeah so it's like yes and no I think that's right I think you can't sign the deal and the goal is to basically get to the point where you don't have to have that conversation in the first place yeah right like you have to figure out some way for people to make money on your platform yeah which is like it this does feel like sort of the last gasp of not knowing that yeah and we come out of vine being dead and immediately everybody's like okay the main thing we have to do is take care of our creators and make them help them make a business out of this platform and that's how we win like everybody learned that the day vine died it seems like which is sort of insane to think about all right number five what feature of vine should every current version have so we're taking one thing out of vine and we're putting into every other social media platform that exists now what is it make it six seconds long it's gonna be my answer too I kind of like the idea like Sarah what you were saying about you have the the vine section and the and the super vine section I think every social media app should have to have a vine section it's it's just six seconds and we just do it again even if it's just old vines I'm fine with that yeah and some ways I like how vine was literally just one concept rather than the everything up which everything is now trying to be like they didn't load it up with new shit they didn't load it up with new features with new buttons really and that is something that I would love to see it's also like I really get annoyed when apps like change small things that like actually like they're constantly tweaking it and changing it and I don't really remember vine doing it that much they added different functionalities but like for the most part what it started as was what it ended as at least like technically you can make a compelling argument that was a problem yeah also I do think there is something yes there is something about the app that was great because of that yeah well by the time they started changing things vines was dead already right exactly right for kids 140 seconds yeah yeah yeah no one's slailing and control right yeah the feature changes were like a sign of of distress and not yeah yeah I think I think that some of those constraints I think should go back into these things because now like I look at tiktok and it's it's it's everything to everyone all the time yeah in a way that is like it just feels bad yeah we all watch it but it feels bad yeah question number six is there an alternate timeline in which vine was more or even more successful if we do it early or later or we we change something can we make vine work better I think there is an alternate timeline where vine was tiktok yeah right like if if the timing had been a little bit different if it had been run by different people like if they had worked out some rights issues because they had prioritized certain things over other things I think there is a world in which vine was tiktok and tiktok never happened one version is I have found really interesting is like what if what if vine ended up in the in the Instagram spot at Facebook instead of being bought by Twitter essentially as a response to that what if what if we came reals first and then the photo's right could find an Instagram yeah I think that's possible yeah I think that is possible I mean it would have just you'd have to have different staff different I mean different everything right like but it's completely different yes everything is completely different than yes I think the answer might be no in that right but it's like can I imagine that universe yes how close is it to this universe pretty far pretty far pretty pretty far that's fair Marina is that what you think too I just like that it didn't succeed like it had to crawl so tiktok wobble I don't know like yeah so that makes me think you think the answer's no no that like this thing was always going to be it had to fail it was too early it was like a trial run yeah I think I think there's there's something to that and I do think again like the industry learned so much from how badly that went that a lot of people have just aggressively not made those same mistakes over the years all right last question does vine belong in the version history Hall of Fame the version history Hall of Fame like all halls of fame everywhere is nebulous and complicated and mostly based on vibes but the question in front of us basically is like was vine important enough like in the in the annals of history did vine like capital M matter enough to belong in the Hall of Fame and I would remind you that there are a lot of things vying for access to the Hall of Fame does vine belong well it's that's legacy is like our reality now like it's almost a dominant media format so I think so it's tricky because it's like I think you can both make the case that it was the thing before the thing right and that it was the thing that invented the thing right like it's it's one of those and it's it's it's right on the line between was it friend feed before Facebook or was it like the thing that made all of this possible and I don't I've never been able to tell how I feel about vine on that front yeah I'm struggling a bit I'm kind of leaning no just because I don't like vine as a platform is not as important as like the cultural output and I don't I guess like I'm not sure in version history what is it museum the Hall of Fame okay sorry in the version history Hall of Fame if it's are we talking strictly like the platform itself are we talking like the ripple effects of it both I think I'll allow both but only if the platform at least gets close on its own you know what I mean like I'll give you cultural ripple effects as a tiebreaker but the platform has to be you know almost there on itself yeah that's why I'm struggling a little bit it's it's a hard one because like for sure vines belong in the Hall of Fame right like that there is they're historically very very significant yes but vine the platform it's really hard to give credit to it because yes there were specific aspects that made it special and and like you know put its imprint on the content that was created but at the same time it was so badly run and they made so many wrong decisions that it's hard to want to give them credit it's just like like you definitely shouldn't have done it like this but yeah yeah so I don't know that that is like a it's real cusp it is I think I think we should land on no but I think someday when we get a you know huge funding grant wheel in the content wing of the version history Hall of Fame I think I think the on fleek video gets like a wing named after the on fleek video is in the version history Hall of Fame I want to say that okay vine maybe not but okay on fleek is okay well right now it's just like it's just like sort of in a in a box waiting for us to open the new building but when we open the new building yes it'll be there yes all right I feel good about it all right that is it for the show thank you off for doing this this is so much fun I have not seen this many vines in a minute and this was a delight thank you for being here with us too as always you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube you can listen to them wherever you get podcasts and if you want to support us and all of this and everything the best way is to subscribe to thevirtual.com see you next time version history is produced by Victoria Barrios river Branson Owen Grove branding key for Travis Larchuck Eric Gomez Andrew Moreno and Alex Parkin studio support from Chris Shirtliffe our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland be sure to subscribe to the new version history podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive