We’d all like to think that the gradual rise of real life Dumb and Dumber white boys Logan and Jake Paul was the nail in Vine’s tiny, ever-looping coffin. The two brothers were among the most popular users on the service, integral in launching it to popularity and still remain prominent in still insanely popular Vine compilations that cover a good portion of YouTube. But really, Vine’s death was prompted by it’s failure to adapt — as if it even could?

A Vine is a Vine because of its length. Its 6.5 second limit is part of its branding, its appeal, its integrity; lose the length, you lose everything. With the proliferation of short video content (and capabilities) rising in more functional, varied apps like Snapchat and Instagram, Vine began to shake in its boots. But change is always happening within our rapidly-changing, short-attention spanned lives. Nothing has a permanent shelf life. Cultural value comes and goes.

As projected in my Development post, we decided to look at the ‘unregulated length’ of these mediums, which, in the case of Vine, we’ve flipped to ‘regulated length’. How does Vine work as this video analog to Twitter’s short-form text posts, if it does at all? How has Twitter’s decision to up the character count from 140 to 280 affected this?

As demonstrated in my Project Work post, it’s a mess. The hypothesis goes out the window. Even at 140 characters, its nigh impossible to speak the chunk of text in any way that doesn’t sound like intelligent voice assistant-in-human-form Janet begging for her digital life in Netflix’s The Good Place. When bumped to 280, its plain hard to watch.

More than anything this experiment highlights the tricky situation that Vine ended up in that ultimately led to its death. Whereas Snapchat added more functionality and showed a willingness to adapt to its growth, and Instagram grew into the behemoth it now is, Vine couldn’t hold pace. Without risking a betrayal of its brand, there was nothing it could do. Users wanted to see more and more and more from their content creators, and popularity grew in applications that could service this. People wanted stories, fleeting moments, content that could be tapped through at will, content less concrete. To the average consumer, Vine’s central idea proved too precarious to make engaging content. Twitter was one thing, Vine was another — they couldn’t gel, and business took its toll.

Snapchat recently dropped their 10 second limit, letting users record for an infinite amount of time. This is the current landscape; constraints no longer matter.

Facebook’s new video-favouring algorithm marks an antagonist to the vibe that Vine was on. Along with the video, sound was integral to Vine — to jokes, to music, to loops — and Facebook is now full of videos with hard-coded text designed to be eye-catching. It’s a new way of engaging with news in a way that appeals to our clickbait sensibilities.

What if Vine never stood a chance? For some content creators it was a blessing, an interesting way of creating a new type of content that couldn’t be done with anything else. Vine was always the dark horse but never hit the peaks that its contemporaries rested at. Constraints are out, the infinite and endless abyss of content is in. With Vine 2 on some distant horizon, is a resurgence of regulated lengths coming? Can something like Vine work again now that their exists no limits?

140 #RIPVINE#TIFpic.twitter.com/p8bAgUmi4s

— Thinking in Vines (@ThinkinginVines) March 8, 2018

Vine reading 140 character tweet

280 #RIPVINE #TIF pic.twitter.com/YwtT9O5nkc

— Thinking in Vines (@ThinkinginVines) March 8, 2018

Vine reading 280 character tweet

https://vine.co/v/e3l6Qe7nYZH

This is a Vine. A Vine is a 6.5 second looping square video hosted on the social networking service of the same name. Vine was launched in 2013 and — through various peaks and troughs — died in 2017, dissolved into the world of increasingly-longer pockets of video content: your Snapchats and Snapchat stories, your Instagram videos. At a time when our attention spans were at their shortest, Vine packed up and shipped out. The limitations of its format became too restricting in a social media world of ten second stories, caption-able text, the proliferation of images. We’ll miss it.

At its peak, Vine created and harboured ecologies/economies of creators. From its consumer base we got absurdist comedy stars the likes of Nick Colletti, Gabriel Gundacker, Josh Ovalle: all who’ve since relocated their followings to Instagram; some who’ve maintained their comedy careers long enough to be playing shows in parts of the US. Vine presented a very real opportunity for a select few people — but how did they get there? How did we get here?

When originally pitched to Twitter, Vine was all but a microblogging tool, a way for people to capture small moments from their daily life and pop them up into the network in some great archive of fleeting happenings; passing cars shot from an upstairs window, great masses of people going on with their daily routines captured in a choppy, almost stop-motion-looking frame rate. And Twitter saw value in it as, as The Verge aptly describes it, a “near-perfect video analog to its flagship app’s short-form text posts”. Short text translates into short video, right?

via GIPHY

There are many things that make a Vine a Vine; inherent parts and processes that, while being absorbed by short-video formats that followed, were popularised and maintained by the service. For starters: Vine is first and foremost a smartphone app, build against the integral functions of a smartphone. You need a phone with a touchscreen (to initiate recording), a camera and a microphone, at its most basic. Just like Instagram, you can only upload content to the service directly from the application.

Taken out of context, a single Vine can appear like gibberish. The Vine embedded above will likely make no sense removed from important contexts that govern the service. It taps into a certain kind of niche internet humor that was central to many communities on the service — now that the Vine network has been taken offline and transformed into a grotesque, digitally-manufactured Museum of the Moving Image in its own way, that Vine has lost some of its power, subject to loop its eternal life away in an enclosed room on some wasting URL. Archive status hurts.

A Vine is a Vine because of its length and its looping functionality. When originally designing the service, Vine’s creators struggled to settle on the perfect length for their micro-stimulation: long enough to be able to actually do something, short enough that you’d would watch the entire thing. This is the most fundamental function — think of all the Facebook and Instagram videos you’ve given up on after catching a glimpse of their length, all the Snapchat stories where someone at a gig is determined to show you the entire thing. “You don’t just skip a six-second video, so you watch it. And when you like it … you appear to watch it three, four, five, six times in a row”, attests the president of a Vine-using marketing company Armstrong, Pierre Laromiguiere.

The key to Vine was its length, and the constraints this length then posed. In cinema, you’ve got ~2 hour and a thousand hours of footage that can be cut in an infinite number of ways. In Vine, you don’t have such luxury. In the world of emerging online screen media projects — from web series to interactive documentaries — making use of, and interrogating, the intrinsic elements of these things is, well … the aim of the studio. It’s a way of making for the new, in response to the new. It’s all very exciting!

For this project we decided to look at the ‘unregulated length’ of these mediums, which, in the case of Vine, we’ve flipped to ‘regulated length’. How does Vine work as this video analog to Twitter’s short-form text posts? How has Twitter’s decision to up the character count from 140 to 280 affected this? We’re living in a post-Vine world, folks. 6.5 seconds is no longer the norm.