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Comment by someperson | Hacker News Reader

It continues to be damning that the leadership of Microsoft did not buy Vine [1] from Twitter in 2017 for pennies on the dollar before Vine was shutdown. Vine was very popular, and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown back when Twitter was bleeding a lot cash.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)

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Honestly hard to tell if this is satire. TikTok is way more compelling than Vine was, even at its peak. The idea that Microsoft not buying a dying Vine from Twitter is indicative of its poor leadership is hard to wrap my head around.

People are talking about Microsoft paying more than $30 billion for TikTok's operations in just four countries. Vine was losing Twitter 10 million dollars a month at a time when Twitter was desperate for cash.

Microsoft (or Google, or Facebook, or any similar cash rich company) could have bought Vine for tens of millions.

The product and algorithm could have been tweaked to be more compelling. Even if the new owner wasn't able to do that, using an existing established platform/audience then cloning the features of upcoming competitors is very powerful.

Easy to say in hindsight. At the time it wasn't so obvious that the problem with vine was algorithmic. They wouldn't have known which direction to tweak in; I don't even think Vine had much of an algorithm. It was mostly news feed no?

TikTok hasn't always been as big as it is right now obviously. ByteDance acquired TikTok for $1 billion only 3 years ago. TikTok definitely was not as big as peak Vine at that time.

Vine's top content creators were demanding to be paid, which was completely intolerable to the whole SV mindset.

So they all flocked to YouTube and got paid.

Yeah, which is of course not part of the “whole SV mindset”.

TikToc is basicaly Vine2.0 and will go down just like Vine and YikYak already did. The reason behind MS wanting to acquire TT we will never know. I have a feeling the national sec. implications arent exactly what we are saying they are.

Neither Vine nor YikYak was doing $3B in profit/year. TikTok is likely here to stay.

Geez, that's impressive. How do they make money? Ads? Selling data? Or do they have a paid offering?

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