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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

If X ne Twitter knew what they were doing, now would have been the obvious moment to relaunch Vine.

I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.

TikTok’s algorithm for the feed and their data science and recommenders are pretty amazing. You can tune it to show you what you like really quickly and it’s effective. Mine is tuned to old house preservation and restoration, a couple guys doing skits as blue collar workers that are some of the funniest parts of my day, motocross videos, and some dog/animal content. I’ve never liked a video or commented on a video, it’s just so effective using dwell time and they have so much data that they can give you exactly what you want and little that you don’t. There is no politics on my feed. I challenge you to get that with twitter, reels, threads, Facebook, vine… any of them

Lack of variety in videos. 6s videos limited the amount of content that could be included to the point where all videos were essentially short comedy skits. TikTok keeps you engaged by showing you a variety of different genres of video. This includes comedy, but also educational videos, sports highlights, video game clips, etc.

Add to this TikTok's algorithm for deciding what content to show you based on how engaged you were in the previous videos and you end up with a "For you" feed that drastically varies from person-to-person. This keeps it fresh and enjoyable at all times.

Youtube tries to do a similar thing by presenting you videos that are similar to your interests, but in my experience it usually trends towards what is likely "more profitable". Meaning longer videos from well-established creators to juice as much ad revenue as possible from the user.

TikTok feels night-and-day in comparison. On TikTok, I can watch a 3 minute educational video on how elevators work, and then scroll once and see 3 second video of a grown man pretending to be a duck

I think we remember Vine through rose colored glasses. There was nothing on vine that was addicting, other than some very famous videos, that are still treated as relics. And everyone knew about those videos, because of how the feed was organized. TikTok is way more tailored-to-the-user.

> There was nothing on vine that was addicting

Well that sounds like a selling point to me.

It's "selling" if you're not going to spend hours on it. Kinda the opposite.

> There was nothing on vine that was addicting

Did we use the same app??

RIP Vine

IIRC people didn’t spend multiple hours a day on Vine. That was one of the reasons why it shut down — they couldn’t grab attention span of the aging users like Instagram and Snapchat did at that period (2012-2016). They also couldn’t get the fomo feeling that younger people nowadays get without TikTok et al.

vine could only do 7 second videos which hurts long-term

Until 2020, most TikTok videos were 15 seconds or so. They only switched to 30 seconds and later 1min+ after gaining huge traction. I guess 7 seconds is pretty short, but it the algorithm that was pretty simple.

7 seconds was great for certain types of videos especially quick comedic ones and brevity being the soul of wit means you have to be intentional with the little time you have

doubling the max duration length added greater versatility for creators while minimizing bloat.

making longer videos beyond a certain length can add to rambling and bloat which is why they've since added speed controls.

The precursor to TikTik (Musical.ly) "failed" as well. I think it's because while apps of that era were able to achieve the viral moment, they failed to convert that into advertising and sponsorship $$$. TikTok, Instagram etc. have perfected that pipeline.

Right idea, wrong time. The number of people with phones and data plans capable of recording, uploading, and viewing good quality video is near 100% now.

Vines were limited to six seconds, so the medium was a little different. That seems easy enough to change however.

Seems to me like they just gave up?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...

I doubt they have the engineering experience to launch anything at this point. They try to do a weird tiktok like thing where watching a video on mobile will randomly scroll to another video, but I think this probably has more to do with juicing "unregretted user seconds" than anything.

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