A Moment of Silence for the Black and Brown Talent That Grew on Vine | Hacker News Reader

A Moment of Silence for the Black and Brown Talent That Grew on Vine

npr.org

101 pointst2327 comments

My problem with Vine is that it was really hard to find good content. There were so many people just making clips of themselves doing stupid crap. Honestly, the only good stuff I found on Vine while it was up was Thomas Sanders' content.

Isn't that a problem with Twitter, Instagram, etc, as well?

Twitter, you can at least follow people that you already know are interesting. Network effects and retweeting expose you to interesting content that they stumble across, and previously unknown accounts that produce interesting content.

Yes. But Vine is in the video space, where it's competing with YouTube, which has a massive back catalogue, and an abundance of originality, good content and talent (yes, really. You may not be looking in the right places, but it's there), which is readily discoverable, and already well known, (CGPGrey, ViHart, Veritasium, VSauce, Vlogbrothers, Schmoyoho, PewDiePie, Markiplier, CrashCourse, Extra Credits, The Jimquisition, Zero Punctuation, TotalBiscuit, PBSDigital, Errant Signal, XboxAhoy, charlieissocoollike, lonelygirl15, The Show With Ze Frank, TomSka, Eddsworld, CollegeHumor, The Game Theorists, Songs to Wear Pants to, MinutePhysics, Hannah Hart, and countless more). Even if you don't like all of it, there's usually something there for you.

When I've seen good stuff on Vine it's always been because someone linked it on twitter or some forum.

So, these people couldn't have the same success on youtube?

They didn't.

Don't get the downvote. Seems like it would be constructive to discuss why they didn't succeed on youtube, are there workarounds to whatever to platform difference are, etc.

Youtube can be a nasty place. Take a look at the comment section of pretty much any video with a black person in it.

Could the most successful people on Twitter have the same success on Medium?

No looping means 6 second content will not have any impact on the viewer. Maybe producing a 5 minute video and a 6 second video needs different skills.

The solution seems easy: replicate your 6 seconds clip 50 times and you'll have a 5 minutes video to upload to youtube.

Instagram videos loop

Does anyone want to take over Vine?

Pornhub, apparently.

Huh. He's not joking: https://www.cnet.com/news/pornhub-offers-to-buy-vine-6-secon...

Seems more like opportunistic PR than a serious offer.

I dunno. 6 seconds isn't that short a time in the life of a porn user.

This is the funniest thing I have ever seen on HN. Well played, sir.

So in "black and brown", what ethnicities qualify as brown? Does it include some, all, or none of the black category?

Hispanics, it says so in the article.

>According to a Pew Research Center survey last year, almost a quarter of teens used Vine; and of those surveyed, 31 percent identified as black (non-Hispanic) and 24 percent as Hispanic.

It doesn't directly state that equivalence, and it seems weird that "black and brown" would exclude groups like middle easterners that are also darker-skinned minorities.

Why would they do this? Seems rather short sighted.

Was probably a lot of maintenance effort for something that didn't catch on widely and duplicated Twitter's own video upload feature, except with more limitations (no videos longer than six seconds, in app recording only). Also, curiously enough it was labelled racist because of exactly the same aspects now being portrayed as positive: http://www.digitalamerica.org/vine-redefining-racial-stereot...

Most racist post I've ever seen on Hackernews. The color of these people's skin has no bearing on their success.

NPR, and all the old media are now competing with BuzzFeed etc for clicks. These sites do not hire trained journalist or even writers. What you get even from NPR etc is republish of blog posts someone wrote while eating breakfast with little or no editorial oversight. Its mostly clickbait trash.

And for those who downvoted this there is a very simple test you can do to reveal racism that you may have grown desensitized to. Simply replace the race with another/white and read it back.

"A Moment of Silence for the White and Yellow Talent That Grew on Vine."

nothing racist there at all...

This is on Codeswitch - their blog by PoC for PoC issues.

It's about the fact that the platform was disproportionately populated and loved by young creative Black and Latinx people.

Why do I post.

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