Goodbye, Vine

Official+Vine+logo.+%28Wikimedia%29+

Official Vine logo. (Wikimedia)

Nisha Klein, Page Editor

Since its creation in June 2012, and purchase by Twitter a few months later, Vine has gained incredible popularity across the world, with a reported 200 million users at the end of 2015. People like Thomas Sanders and LeLe Pons, and even singer Shawn Mendes, have risen to fame through the spread of their six-second clips. However, the company announced mid-October that the site would be shut down.

“Vine being deleted is like an old friend [I haven’t really] talked to in a while dying [and] even tho[ugh] we [weren’t] close anymore it hurts to see them go,” tweeted Viner Gabbie Hanna. Hanna.

At this point, it is unclear what exactly went wrong. Social media is an aggressive business in which it is difficult for any site to survive. With such a competitive market, companies cannot be expected to last using only one medium.  Despite origins as a platform for specific types of entertainment or communication, most eventually have to evolve to incorporate all sorts of media. Instagram, known for its function as a photo-sharing app, changes dramatically with each update. A few years ago, the site added the ability to post short videos, a feature previously associated with Vine. Because of this, many blame Vine’s demise on Instagram.

However, others claim that Vine’s refusal to share more than short videos could have led to its downfall says the New York Times. Now, nearly all social media sites offer nearly all of the same forms of communication. In order to compete with Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr recently added a new instant messaging system. Instagram received backlash when it began to include “stories,” which had been unique only to Snapchat. Yet Vine remained mainly the same.

Vine claims that the only thing that will change is that no new vines will be made. The site, if it remains, will simply serve as an archive of already published videos.