Remember Vine, that annoying as hell 6 second video sharing service that was big in the early-mid 2010’s, that service that Twitter bought, kept around for a while then killed off in 2016? The one that spawned the “careers” of many an annoying and, in some cases, controversial to be internet celebrities (I’m looking at you Logan Paul) and all those god awful “VINE COMPILATION WHATEVER MONTH AND YEAR” videos that to this day still sometimes are suggested on YouTube?
Yeah. Turns out it’s finally “back” in a sense, after 4 years. The funny thing is, I thought it had already come back, in the guise of the even more annoying “TikTok” but no, that’s an unrelated (but slightly similar) project. What we have here is, literally, “Vine 2.0.” The project name was changed to V2 and then it was put on hiatus for a time (check the wiki article, I’m not covering this as “news” in any celebratory sense) but just a few days ago released properly on iOS and Android to what seems like decent regard, from what I can tell.
It took 4 years off and on to re-create, in effect, a service which had already existed — a place to share 6 second long video clips, not that you couldn’t do that already on virtually any website now, seeing as after Vine got popular pretty much ever other social media site made videos in some form a more prominent feature. This also ignores, as I said before with Vine way back when, that YouTube has existed this entire time and would be an equally fine place to produce such.
Well, not really. A site designed for such would naturally spawn a culture al of its own, and become it’s own thing, in effect, but at this stage, does that matter? Does anyone care about an 8 year old concept now? It was an idea that was all novelty — almost gimmick, in a sense, and while it did pay off, look at how quickly it was shelved by Twitter?
I bring this up because byte is supposed to be offering compensation to creators, which means, yep, ads are coming, if they aren’t already there. Oh boy, just what we need, another ad laden site, with creators coming to it strictly to make money, as opposed to have a genuine interest in creating good content. I wonder how long, if ever, it will be truly profitable.
Of course, given what spawned on Vine during its run I’m not seeing much hope for any “good” content to come from this. Just the same stuff that dominated Vine, just with 2020 memes instead of 2013 memes. It’s nothing I care for, and even beyond that I feel, given how the internet has changed in the past few years, is a few years too late.
At least, I hope it is.
I actually covered quite a bit of what I thought on this subject years ago in this article which may be worth a look.
Oh, by the way, in writing this article, I just read the service already has a “bot” problem after 3 days. Hah. What else would one expect? It’s 2020, your new network is going to get slammed with bots day zero. Eh, it is what it is. Welcome to the internet.