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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

You're 100% correct.

They shut down Vine. TikTok is now a billion dollar industry.

As far as I'm concerned, every product manager involved in that decision shouldn't be involved with Twitter anymore, because they display an astonishingly level of incompetence.

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Vine was exploding when they shut it down, and some of the biggest influencers of today started on Vine. It's incomprehensible to me why anyone would shut down such an absolute jackpot, bizarre really!

Vine should have been what TikTok is today, it was so close to being a product that I wanted to see and use. TikTok without the close relationship with the People's Republic of China would be so much fun to use.

I will never understand this. I thought vine was going to be the next big thing right until the day they decided to shut it down.

The fact that vine as a name and at least some vines are still at least somewhat prevalent online, makes me think that vine literally was "already" the next big thing and twitter just completely misread the room.

yeah, people are still reconnecting with vine creators, on TikTok. You can see in the comments, a video came up on the user's feed and they were compelled enough to be like "are you so and so from vine!?" Vine was killed half a decade ago.

And YouTube. Some of the biggest commentary channels used to be Viners.

The fact that it was shut down when it was is testament to how badly Twitter misplayed their hand with it. Every single creator flocked to whatever platform would take them at the time.

"Twitter supports videos now, therefore Vine is redundant! Shut it down and 100% of Vine users will post their videos on Twitter!"

—Twitter PMs, probably

If that's the rationale it has to be one of the worst tech product decisions in history. Out-doing even Googles collection of product shutdowns here.

I think it's a lot more likely that there are/were a horde of PMs there who thought it was a very dumb and short-sighted decision to shut it down at the time. In my experience, it's usually some high-ranking exec who makes confounding decisions through authority in big tech. Not so much the average IC PM who has to spend time understanding their users for their job.

The Vic Gundrota Google+ school of Product Management.

Thanks for the reminder. Yes, this was pretty much 100% the rationale from Twitter at the time.

What was your position at Twitter at the time? I'm interested to know where you heard it from, to the extent that you can disclose.

Does anyone know _why_ Vine was shut down? Was it just a major cost center or something?

Wow, never heard of Vine (call me out of touch grumpy old man user persona!), but reading the wikipedia page, what is amazing it was aquired for less than one of today's early rounds - $30m. Maybe they were "too early"? Post pandemic things look a lot different.

Vine was not too early by any means. It was exploding in popularity when they shut it down. It absolutely would have been as big as Tik Tok if they got the algorithm right.

Was it, though? My memory isn't perfect, but I seem to recall the days after Instagram copied the video feature, there were articles on tech blogs mocking Vine on how Facebook was going to eat their lunch. You could even refresh your browser on Vine's Twitter page and watch the count of its followers decreasing in realtime. Not pushing back, I just remember it kind of petering out in popularity (in the US, at least) and then quietly going away, and everyone sort of shrugged.

The 6 second limitation was holding them back and their competitors knew that longer formats would be more successful. The vine 6 second format was interesting and kind of "created" the format that turned into tik tok, but there is no doubt that vine would had to have pivoted sooner rather than later. Still, the decision to shut it down was shocking and short sighted.

Vine was at the peak of internet culture and mindshare when it was shut down. I have to believe there was some kind of personal vendetta or motivation behind the shut down. It makes absolutely no sense.

Vine was massively popular. Everyone was shocked when it was shut down.

No shit.

Twitter is filled with extravagantly paid Product Managers with thoroughly mediocre (at best) results. Vine is a great example, but think about the complete lack of imagination when it comes to Musk's idea of charging users $3/month. I would absolutely pay that to be on a Twitter free of bots. And wow, how bad is the data science team at Twitter that they can't spot the OBVIOUS bots all over the site? When you see what they get paid, that's what makes it pathetic.

I would put parascope on that as well, they strangled meerkat for the live streaming market then let their product die.

Periscope was a brilliant streaming app. And one of the first that you could write messages to people who were streaming.

It was an incredibly intimate experience to write something, and see people in the video you're watching, react to it live. Seems normal now, with so many streaming apps, but periscope was the first I saw on mobile do this well.

Eventually, the big apps implemented it too (Facebook, Snapchat... Instagram). Which killed Periscope...

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