As a society, we need to bring back Vine… and I know how to get it done.
We lost a cornerstone of internet culture when we lost Vine in 2017. After disabling uploads and archiving its contents, the sociopaths at Twitter dot com removed the site’s archive. Now, the best we have is poorly-curated Vine compilations on YouTube. It is not the same.
Nobody has done anything with a phone and the internet as funny as America, Explain! or Fre Sh A Vacado. These cultural mainstays defined a generation. Even the “two bros chillin’ in the hot tub five feet apart cuz they’re not gay” meme made its rounds again recently on the bird app. The staying power that has.
In the biz, that’s what we call “evergreen content.”
If I could lay on the couch watching the same Vine loop over and over as my edible hits, maybe I’d forget that the entire world is shit right now. Maybe I’d even watch the “Is that a weed?!” Vine and be like yeah kinda, but it’s an edible, so it’s like, weed, but not “a weed” and then I’d remind myself that I’ve seen this particular Vine at least a hundred times and that’s literally the joke.
My iPhone’s screentime report averages a horrendous eight hours a day or more some weeks. Imagine all the time we could save if everything was six seconds. Alternatively, consider the benefits of a more likely scenario in which we take those eight hours a day and spend it watching 86,400 six-second Vines.
We don’t need minute-long videos and paragraphs of text, nor Spaces or Stories or Groups to do all that – just six seconds and vibes. That is why I propose the following:
Literally, nobody could stop us from just fucking pretending every social media app is Vine.
We could all post exclusively six-second videos on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook (if anyone is still on it). And they couldn’t do anything to stop us!
It wouldn’t be the exact same experience, but we could get pretty close. We can expect only good things from this collective action.
We could still post thirst traps and puns in under six seconds, and viral dances would be a lot easier to learn. Taylor Swift could be all like, Bring Back Vine (Taylor’s Version) (Six-Second Version). Euphoria could include the entire plot of one of their episodes in a Vine. Also, it would be so much easier to know who Tati Westbrook is fighting with if the apology videos were that short.
Jen Psaki could still express contempt for the needs of everyday Americans in under six seconds, and imagine how convenient it will be for our local police departments to keep us informed – those body cams are only ever on long enough to record six seconds of misconduct anyway.
Sure, we have Vine to blame for Logan Paul and David Dobrik, but we also got Shawn Mendes out of the experience. If it weren’t for Vine, today’s gays would have to find someone else to project their internalized homophobia on by speculating about their sexuality. Can you imagine the horror?
We probably would have avoided TikTok drama like the West Elm Caleb fiasco because you can’t even say that phrase and anything else meaningful in under six seconds. Come to think of it… was there even drama on Vine?
All the things we actually like about social media today could still have thrived on Vine, like that guy listening to Fleetwood Mac and drinking cranberry juice. Tell me that TikTok couldn’t have fit in six seconds. You can’t! If I trimmed it down to six seconds and cropped it into a square you would not be able to tell the difference, just like I legitimately can’t tell the difference between the 2014 versions of Kurtis Conner and Harry Styles.
“What about Reels,” you say as if Reels aren’t just reposted TikToks. “What about that Byte or Clash app or whatever it’s called now?”
Find me one person who uses Clash and one Reel that is better than any comparable Vine.
I’ll wait six seconds.
Vine wasn’t just dumb videos. Vine was used to share videos from the frontlines of embassy bombings and the Ferguson protests. Vine creators launched songs from obscurity to the top of the Billboard charts, like “Don’t Drop That Thun Thun.” Oh, and the tracklist of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was revealed via Vine video.
Daft Punk has since split up and also COVID happened. Coincidence?!
Sure, Vine had no built-in monetization, and who knows what the fucking internet Nazis would do with that platform now, but I trust Vine more than I do content moderators of our current video-based platforms.
I just want my Vine and I’m ready to take it back by force.
