Vine’s Death Signals Creative Recession

The year is 2048. The economy has fallen into a deep recession. Technology is no longer benefitting the public, but instead, has developed into arms race between various private corporations who dream of infinite fortune. Creators struggle to come up with new ideas, innovations, and ways to advance the world in a positive way. The right hemispheres of their respective brains have been permanently damaged from underuse and neglect, and this is having a negative effect on society and all it is able to provide.

In January 2017, the Vine app, which enabled a network of users to seamlessly create and share 6-second videos, transformed into the simplified Vine Camera app. This new app enables videos to be created, but instead, only provides options for users to either upload them to Twitter or their camera roll. This drastic change is a result of Vine’s struggle to define their vision.

“A couple of things plagued Vine, and it all stems from the same thing, which is a lack of unity and leadership on a vision,” said Ankur Thakkar, Vine’s head of editorial from 2014 until May 2016, in an interview with The Verge. Additionally, Twitter, which bought the Vine company for a reported $30 million in 2012, decided that Vine couldn’t keep pace with the innovative updates to Snapchat, Facebook, and other platforms.

Having been deprived of its community aspect, Vine has ceased to provide an environment for creators to produce and collaborate in a way that is easy and accessible.

The death of Vine is about more than the cancellation of an app; it is a bitter end to spirit, an abolishment to creativity, the removal of a platform on which users could express themselves in every way imaginable. The convenience of the easy-to-make 6-second videos is a feat that cannot be replicated by other popular platforms such as Youtube, which has a complicated uploading process for their content. Vine’s simplicity was what initially attracted users.

“[Vine’s possibilities] became pretty clear as soon after we launched,” said Vine founder Dom Hofmann. “Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation.”

Without such a streamlined platform for creators to utilize, they are further hindered from coming up with ideas and creating content. This begins the vicious circle of a lack of content due to lack of inspiration, and this inspiration can basically only be summoned by the comedic and creative videos Vine used to provide.

One might turn to Instagram, an app that also gives users the option to post brief videos for their followers. However, Instagram will never be able to replace the Vine-sized hole in society, considering that it is an app primarily used for pictures. As of February 2017, images made 91.07% of all Instagram posts, leaving a mere 8.93% of videos, according to social analytics and reporting company Locowise. Instagram’s reputation of being primarily a photo-sharing app isn’t subject to change anytime soon, thus making it an unreliable replacement for Vine.

With this regression, mankind has ceased advancing and has instead taken a step back. For our rising generation, the death of Vine is the death of ingenuity itself.