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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think anyone has the guts to mention in these articles that musical.ly looked to a non-user as teenage erotica for teenagers.

Back to the topic: I think Vine already showed us that there was a market for a video-based social media application that was tied to your @-handle. YouTube has over the years become way too proper and high-effort for creatives that want to do it for fun. Instagram was too picture-based. A good video editor and fame (or notoriety) and the unofficial Vine-descendant is born.

I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.

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> I wonder what the people at Vine thought after they saw TikTok do what they did with a few tweaks.

Well, the founders made ~$10MM each with 5 months of work. So they were probably happy at the time. But Vine was too early, so I think video storage and movement was still pretty expensive for non-FANG companies. So they limited uploads to 6 seconds. I think that limitation was too low to do what TikTok does.

But the real reason they were too early is recommendation systems like TikTok uses seem to have been based on work done since Vine was shuttered.

I'm sceptical of that. ByteDance developed the recommendation tech a while back, at one point they had the most successful news recommendation service in India without any engineers speaking the language.

99fang in 2009, ByteDance in 2012, Vine in 2012.. I don't know your definition of "a while back" but if you have some background on this I would be excited to hear it!

Vine had real traction, why did Twitter kill it?

That's just about the only thing Musk got right regarding Twitter - Twitter management the last years has been an absolute shitshow.

No idea what they wanted, no idea where they wanted to go to, and no idea on how to use what they had.

It's impressive that he's managed to make it even more chaotic.

Because like Zuck said, Twitter was a clown car. Engineering could build good stuff. The management and board was however one clown after another.

Well, Dick Costolo, a previous CEO, was actually a clown: "Upon graduation, he decided not to accept offers from technology companies and instead moved to Chicago to work in improvisational comedy" [1]

There is even a 2012 New York Times article: "A Master of Improv, Writing Twitter’s Script" [2]

I always wonder how media portraits an alternate reality where people and organization behaves as if they were living within The Truman Show [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Costolo

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/technology/dick-costolo-o...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show

Well he never even attended clown college

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...

Yeah imagine a person with a powerful position in technology having diverse interests and an unusual background.

shudders

That is not a clown. Clowns don make up and there is a significant effort and education that should be done to be a real clown.

Improv is a fantastic tool that I recommend to everyone. The basic concept of Yes, and… makes a huge difference from an emotional intelligence perspective.

I do not know but one thing I do is that it felt like they never had ads. Twitter in general was way worse with monetization. Perhaps it was not sustainable and a bigger loss leader than Twitter.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1328744086849925120 : "Back when Vine was a thing, all the top Vine creators, a significant amount of them young and black, went to Twitter asking for a larger percentage of ad revenue since they were working so hard to generate content.

So Twitter shut down Vine."

(also cites https://www.mic.com/articles/157977/inside-the-secret-meetin... )

Like all union-busting actions, the purpose of this was not simple financial maximisation but showing who was in charge.

>a significant amount of them young and black

[citation needed], this sounds like outrage porn for a certain kind of person.

Those creators could choose to stop creating content and Vine would still have lots of other creators. It's not like the site would've stopped functioning without the few unionists.

Exactly

hola

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