By Rebecca Fernandez
A couple of weeks ago, I woke up ready to ingest as many six-second videos as possible before facing the hideous morning, and I was met with self-help memes, Big No’s tragic cinematic zoom-outs, all captioned with the same hashtag — #RIPVINE. An official statement by Vine on Medium regarding its decision to discontinue the massively influential mobile app confirmed my worst fear. The statement reads like a break-up full of pacifying phrases, “We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,” but is devoid of the explanation we all need to find closure. Vine might as well have told us, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or more accurately, it’s not Vine, it’s Twitter.
The six-second looping format lent itself to the boundless creativity of the young people who manipulated it into skits and songs, or opened their app at just the right time to capture what would soon become a viral clip. Scrolling down the “trends” page of Vine’s website it is clear that many of the biggest influencers on the app are middle-class black kids without the know-how to monetize their hobby. The app’s owners struggled similarly under the pressure to profit.
Thirty-second ads are a bust on an app full of six-second masterpieces and the sponsored tab was failing. Per the New York Times, in the weeks before its decision to close Vine, Twitter hoped to sell itself and feared a loss of buyers because of past issues regulating abuse. Unable to address its reputation for being the kind of place in which outspoken women get bullied into hiding, Twitter looked upon Vine as its burdensome little sibling — the one satisfied with hosting the creative impulses of young creatives of color with no obvious money grubbing scheme to offer. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though.
Black teenagers shared videos of themselves dancing the “Nae Nae,” coined by “WeAreToonz,” and inspired “challenges” for white teenagers to try their best version of the dance. The inventors and carriers of these crazes became anonymous once Justin Bieber was making a joke out of it with Ellen while she doled out money to white viral video stars. Their proliferation means more than just happy cultural intermingling.
As Vine grew and audiences became more diverse, opportunities to profit on black and Latinx identity became open to certain Viners. Super Vine stars such as Rudy Manusco (who is Brazilian and Italian but makes videos posing as a Mexican gardener) profit on dehumanizing tropes against people of color and reveal the exploitative greed behind the push to monetize Vine content that prevents black and Latinx creators from getting paid.
People such as Kayla Newman, username “Peaches Monroee,” opened Vine to record herself and soon, “Eyebrows on fleek,” was reposted across every social network, the words were in the mouth of every celebrity, in pop songs, and on the news. Despite her original Vine having been looped more than 114 million times, Newman’s life is relatively the same but for the numerical changes on her profile. Ellen didn’t offer her a scholarship. Vine didn’t offer her a promotional deal. At some point, someone at Twitter decided that people like Newman are impossible to invest in.
The ease with which Twitter let go of Vine speaks volumes about its priorities and a larger trend of companies’ racist and classist selective investment in creative contributions. Axing Vine depreciates the innovations of black and Latinx creators while forcing them to move onto Twitter and other similar networks in which their contributions can be monetized and benefit the owners. #RIPVINE is full of content creators and consumers mourning the loss of a rich cultural artifact, and my external hard drive is wheezing with the effort of downloading 8,000 of my favorite Vines before it is too late.
Twitter, Vine was always too good for you.