I guess the data mining was the missing ingredient for popularity?
As far as I remember, vine didnt really fail, it was just killed off one day.
It was growing too. It just wasn’t profitable.
These days we have much cheaper ways to handle uploading and downloading insane amounts of video content (if you’re interested, I recommend checking out some System Design resources on TikTok or YouTube), but it’s pretty much all CDN and slightly more efficient backend services). We also have better ways to monetize platforms. Like data. Buttt ByteDance is also trying to do things like set up physical goods stores/etc, and it’s 2024 where userbase and brand name is more important than actual revenue anyways.
Can you link some of these system design ressources?
This one is good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghYbFgeqXa0 (on plane atm otherwise I’d link his actual sources too, which he talks about in the start)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ghYbFgeqXa0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Twitter clearly mishandled it. All they needed to do was give the option to post longer videos. Classic example of a large company buying a small innovative service and destroying it for no reason. I assume they thought it was too similar and in competition with Twit’s existing ability to post videos.
It wasn’t about video length, it was about the Twitter leadership at that time being categorically incapable of monetizing any of their products.
Combine that with the orders-of-magnitude higher cost of running Vine compared to the bird, and it was always either going to be sold off or shut down.
It’s easy to forget that this was back in the time when these companies thought they were changing the planet for the better and drinking their own Kool aid by the gallon.
The video length was pretty limiting, though. Instagram at the time started doing 15 second videos. The six seconds lent itself to goofy comedy and not much more.
It seems like they should have sold it. Or just jammed in a bunch of ads… maybe an option to remove ads with a paid membership. Simply killing it doesn’t make any money other than to avoid losing more, and they’d already invested a fair bit which you can’t recoup by just closing something. Of course, Google does that all the time I guess.
Maybe they saw it as an acqui-hire moment to get their staff, or at least keep them from going ro a conpetitor.
Of course, that assumes social media owners have clues and strategy; it seems like a lot of them were “we stumbled into vsast success, now what.”
So data mining was the missing ingredient…
Money was the missing ingredient, so yes, in a roundabout way.
Data mining, timing, and just sheer luck I guess.
See also: Sega Dreamcast: had online multiplayer and industry redefining graphics, but hamstrung by an onboard 33.6kbps modem.
Flappy Bird: one of the most rudimentary games ever, but just seemed to take off and start it’s own snowballing success.
Google Glass: probably had the data mining and cash to weather a bad luck storm, but ultimately was a lower spec AR set that are being hawked today.
I suppose musical.ly rode the wave of popularity, hit the right time post-credit crunch, and rebranded itself in such a way that the pandemic was good for business…
…oh, and the liberal use and sharing of data, too.
but hamstrung by an onboard 33.6kbps modem.
That was not the issue tbh. Console online MP didn’t really become a thing outside of a handful of games (with small playerbases) until the 360/PS3/Wii era, with the one major exception being the Xbox with Xbox live. But the Xbox didn’t launch until 2 years after Dreamcast and Xbox live didn’t go up until almost 4 years after Dreamcast’s launch.
What killed Dreamcast was likely a few things.
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Sega was in dire financial straits after the Saturn. Sony buried them hard and they were losing $100-$150 a unit by some estimates because Sony forced them to drop the price on their already expensive to manufacture console to compete with the PSX. You should check out the podcast Business Wars, they did a series on Nintendo vs PlayStation that actually covered this incredibly well. I have read a lot about the industry, but that was honestly one of my favorite ways of hearing that story. It’s very engaging.
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The Dreamcast era was interesting. Sega restructured into basically several companies under the gaming banner - it was kind of cool. One company focused on experimental games, one company focused on porting arcade games (one of the console’s greatest strengths), things like that. Unfortunately, they did not trust in their own vision, and they pulled the plug on development/support very early. There are not a lot of games for the Dreamcast and they were only developing them for like half the time other consoles get support.
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Price. We’ve seen it time and time again. Coupled with the awkward timing of the launch (2 years before Xbox, 1 year before PS2) and people were able to buy clearly superior consoles for the same price or cheaper. It needed to be $50 cheaper and come out in 1997. It was better than an N64/PSX but inferior to 6th gen competitors.
Oh yes, absolutely - all valid points and a good rundown.
My point was - in a short sentence, the online multiplayer is a subsystem we take for granted now, but was brought to market before the infrastructure really could support it.
I loved the dreamy too, it’s just a shame that Sega were in such terrible financial waves - probably because it spent a good chunk of cash on doomed add-ons to it’s 16bit series of consoles.
Sorry for the total monologue there lol I just love this subject. And I love my dreamcast!
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The Dreamcast failed because it released on 9/9/99, then 11 days later, the PS2 was revealed at the Tokyo Game Show. The PS2 looked like a better system on paper, so no one bought a Dreamcast.
It was apparently selling well in the West, but Sega of Japan gonna Sega of Japan.
Was gonna say, knew quite a few people with a DreamCast, was surprised they kinda gave up on it
(EDIT: then again, literally everyone had a PS2…)
Yeah that was a huge part of it too. I’m not saying this was the only part. Just a big contributing factor.
I don’t know man, I agree with everything you say but I wouldn’t say the security element killed the system - the PS1 and DS had rampant piracy but still sold like hot cakes. I know people (anecdotal evidence alert) who bought a first gen Switch because it was so easy to flash and exercise the ability to boot “homebrew software”.
I’m pretty sure the CD trick only worked on the first (or first iterations) of DC hardware too - I forget whether they either patched out the ability to read CD’s aside from karaoke discs, or whether it was a change in CD drive or laser in manufacturing - but I didn’t see much piracy where I was.
In a case of “opposite side of the same coin” though, I remember a small surge of people buying a CD just for Bleem!, and the ability to play patched editions of PS1 games on a DC. I understand Metal Gear Solid played well on it.
Fun times.
Vine never allowed more than a 6 second clip. Other platforms immediately included short video formats upon Vines success, but added more flexibility to content creators. When content creators got “Vine famous” they moved to other platforms that allowed for flexibility in content. Vine died when it had no more creators.
It is content and content creators that make a platform successful or not. It’s why platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, etc., pay big creators millions of dollars for exclusive rights to their content. Anyone can make a content sharing platform, but they can’t take content.
Except that Vine did allow videos longer than 6 seconds.
I was big into Vine. Like it was the only thing I cared about for a period of time.
That was only months before Twitter announced it would be slowly shutting it down in October. It was a last gasp, too little too late unfortunately. The article you posted even mentioned it was a reaction to creators posting “teasers” that lead watchers to other sites, where the creators were establishing, or had already established, a solid base.
They seem to be hoping that now, with AI, they can. :-|
A ton of this!
I’m a way bigger fan of long-form content. I hardly even get any videos suggested on TT that are less than 3-5 minutes (mostly history and philosophy type stuff). It’s pretty awesome how good it is at recommending stuff you’ll like!
I could never imagine watch strictly 6 sec videos. It’s just not for me
Yeah I think paying the creators generously and allowing them to make a good living is how tiktok got off the ground so fast.
I really love the vine 6 sec sketch format but I only ever watches compilations on youtube. It’s like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’ll get, but eat enough of them… :D PS: Man this makes me nostalgic about those ancient times when everything wasn’t going to shit yet
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Lol the hilarious part is I remember that, at the time, Vine was supposed to be the horrible cancer website everyone hated. Always with the ‘omfg wtf downvoted for posting Vine.’
Then like a year after it was gone all you here about it is how great it had been.
People started to romanticise myspace as soon as it was gone
MySpace is gone?
It reboot itself as a music-oriented social network, but it’s no where near what it was in its heyday
If it helps, some of us never used it, didn’t get it, and don’t miss it
It’s the “new bad old good” circlejerk internet hipsters love.
The real lesson that’s never learned is you don’t know how good you had it until it’s gone
I thought the real lesson that’s never learned is that everything is just doomed to get worse forever?
I guess the data mining was the missing ingredient for popularity?
Data mining was the missing ingredient for its sustainability (in the case it is “free” and centralised. The other two options are “paid”, and “federated”.)
Once the system is sustainable that way, and the owners get greedy, they then add addiction inducing elements to the platform, designed by psychiatrists and psychologists.
That is why it is popular.
Personally I dont see the appeal in the short video format in general and I really don’t understand why it has become so popular.
That’s because you were born before 2005 and still have some semblance of an attention span
Fucking this. Zoomers were raised with gifs and algorithms sinking any video longer than 5 minutes to the depths of search results. Every media outlet wanted these people to only be able to read the clickbait title, click it, and immediately be distracted by flashy, animated ad. Their brainwashing is insanely successful. To me a tiktok or instagram scrolling looks like a feverish dream of constantly changing colors and shapes, nothing that resembles content that you want to focus on.
Some pre 2005 people are zoomers tho, the oldest zoomers are 24. Gen Alpha might be more fitting.
Yeah I’m pre-2005 and still look back on Vine fondly. The difference I think is that Vine was genuinely kind of innocent. It didn’t have a massive corporate backing until the one that killed it, and there wasn’t really a way to monetize it back then. It was just a goofy place on the internet with weird, niche content that was also ubiquitous amongst the younger generations. It sadly laid the grounds for TikTok, but it needs to be remembered that Vine was killed because it wasn’t monetizable, at least not back then. It’s the difference between early internet and corporate internet.
I didn’t understand the appeal of Twitter, Vine even less so, and TikTok just baffles me. Here I was thinking that building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options was the best path forward, and the majority of people just wanted a 4 second video that breaks half the time, with no player controls, and shit covering three quarters of the screen. Well alriiiighty then!
dopamine pump goes brrrr.
But also, I think to some degree, “building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options” is kind of just. Investor speak. It’s kind of impossible. Systems are brittle, communication needs to be flexible, to some degree.
Speaking more specifically, right, if we’re looking at reddit and lemmy as examples, we have to think about the kinds of content that these systems are incentivizing. Upvotes float a post to the top of the front page, top of the comments section, right, and then that kind of lends itself to platforms where the top posts are snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely agree with, while the most downvoted posts are going to be snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely disagree with. And then you’re getting the full range in-between, with really no way to kind of properly find things based on what their substance is. The organization structure, basically, is arranged based on the kind of collective idea of quality, which isn’t really a specific enough kind of organization to be useful to most people.
So, that has drawbacks. What if we just went at it like a classic forum, right? People make accounts, people make posts, maybe you even have a membership fee. Well, now post quality has maybe gone up, but we’ve also created a large barrier to entry, which is a really bad strategy for growth. That’s maybe not a problem, as people tend to kind of, stupidly prioritize rapid expansion over steady growth and the quality of their core product, right, without really understanding the value they are actually looking to create.
Realistically though the biggest problem is just that the insularity of the forum is kind of going to be a snowballing thing, especially depending on subject matter. Jargon and in-jokes can develop that make it basically impossible to interface with as a newcomer, and that’s going to lead to a kind of inertial collapse where forums just slowly come up and then slowly go back down. Also contributing to this is kind of a point at which every discussion has been had before on the server archives, so any time you make a new post, refer to post 1224. If they don’t just die from inflation of basic goods, and can’t afford to keep up hosting costs, which is also a major killer of classic forums.
So, conventional forums also have drawbacks. So maybe we get rid of the accounts, now it’s anonymous, and everything is still going to be organized chronologically, right? Nope, that sucks, because now there’s not really any incentive to keep up post quality and your forum is going to get spammed to death with the maximum amount of possible noise, meaning you need to take on bot filters, which means you need to create more brittle systems to try and sort quality posts away from chaff. You could also just, not do this, and let chaff kind of swim around on your platform, but, that might not be a great idea, I dunno.
If you do end up somehow making a platform that can be, at the very least, popular and desirable for communication, then you’ve basically just ended up making a public good that you’re probably not massively paid for. Queue the platform getting bought out and ruined by an idiot stooge. Not just elon, but also, every other platform on the internet ever.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to look at all that and just think. Man. I want some more dopamine! Turn on the dopamine pump! And then the corporation says, yes sir, here is your dopamine pump, “free” of charge, of course, go to town.
Basically the cynicism is from two ends, is what I’m saying. It’s from the fact that the internet is kind of constantly undergoing a kind of expansion and contraction, where the systems work at the low end, and then rise, and then collapse under their own weight once noise starts to accumulate, right, so an ideal system is somewhat impossible, at least, under the current kind of economic constraints, maybe, but maybe also in general. So there’s a cynicism to that, right. There’s also the cynicism of being conscious of that. And then there’s also the cynicism of like, people just not really wanting communication, and wanting dopamine pumps. Though, I think people might really want both, if they were pressed on it.
You’ve outlined pretty much all of the challenges. I thought for years about just making a reddit style forum without any voting buttons, or maybe voting buttons but no visible scores. Maybe prioritizing comments like yours, which have actual substance. The threaded format is better than traditional forums for conversations, but the voting hurts meaningful contributions like you said already. The biggest reason why projects like that fail is the same reason why every successful company is another wham, bam, thank you ma’am platform. For a social community to work, you need a community. The best platform in the world doesn’t mean anything if nobody is there. Most people aren’t interested in building communities either, so if no one is there, no one is ever going to be there. MySpace and Facebook succeeded because they were novel, and people were interested in the new concept of having a presence on the Internet without needing to know how to create a WordPress website. That was 20 years ago now, so the novelty is gone. TikTok succeeded because they had financial backing from one of the largest countries in the world to create a huge userbase in a short amount of time. I don’t think it would have caught on like it did without CCP support. So that leaves us where we are now, and not a lot of paths out of here. I really enjoyed old forums, and I enjoyed visiting people’s blogs even more, but there aren’t many people doing that stuff any more, and you can’t find the ones that are since Google prioritizes enormous websites and paid content over relevance now. Oh well. I’m glad that I was able to be a part of the beautiful creation that was the early internet. It was a truly magical experience.
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Imagine thinking that Twitter (now X) wasn’t doing data mining on vine.
Imagine thinking that any for-profit company built on VC funding won’t end up data mining.
I’m certain they did, but the main page of vine was curated by humans at some point. It was organic for a moment in time or at least gave that appearance.
What are the odds Elon would bring it back if pressed?
They aren’t the same app just renamed?
You are thinking of Musical.ly
Ok but aren’t Tiktok and Musically literally the same app?
Yup they are same musicaly got rebranded to Tiktok
