Not really. Snapchat and Instagram both introduced video features around the time Vine started declining. Instagram's video support is what killed the Vine userbase as the big creators moved off of Vine.
TikTok didn't fill a void, it's a fantastic video app that did a lot of things right. There was a lot of new video apps after Vine died, none of them were successful.
TikTok most definitely filled the void left by Vine. Vine was short video, usually chopped up, lots of one person skits. That type of content was not popping up on Instagram or Snapchat. Snapchat video would disappear, Instagram video felt more like a typical Instagram post but with video, or just throw away stories.
TikTok came in with short videos, collaboration tools, audio sharing, and has a realness that Instagram does not.
Also funny enough many Viners lived together in the same building so they could collaborate. We saw the same thing happen with TikTok.
Vine had almost as many active users as Twitter, yet there are users actually claiming no one used it. smh
The service failed because it was in high competition and they lost momentum. While Tiktok succeeded simply because it was fresh, appeared at a time when demand for personal and videos was growing, and offered the right combination of UX that satisfied its target audience.
vine was used by almost no one. tiktok didn’t fill a void, it created a new space. all the reasons tik tok is successful didn’t exist on vine. the only thing they share is video
>I don't really think that's the case. I'd still argue lack of investment from Twitter is what killed Vine.
Conclude whatever you like, my understanding is that Instagram video directly killed Vine after the big creators had meetings with Vine executives about getting paid to stay on Vine. I guess that could be considered a lack of investment, but it can't be ignored that Instagram captured the creator base.
"Former executives say that a major competitive challenged emerged in the form of Instagram, which introduced 15-second video clips in June 2013. “Instagram video was the beginning of the end,” one former executive told me. “[Vine] didn’t move fast enough to differentiate.” Instagram courted celebrities with longer videos, eventually bumping the limit to a more flexible 60 seconds. (Vines didn’t break the 6-second barrier until earlier this year, and its extended videos never caught on.) Instagram also began promoting celebrity accounts in its popular “explore” tab, bringing them attention that Vine found difficult to match. Marketers began shifting their money away from Vine, and stars followed."
Vine had the talent and the creative editing down. Many of the biggest YouTube stars started with Vine. World Star Hip Hop vine compilations were incredibly culturally relevant. They fumbled the bag, so of course those in charge would look to blame it on IG. Did IG have an impact? Sure, but this type of content never took off there. If IG really killed Vine for those reasons you listed TikTok would have never happened.
We don’t have hard numbers obviously but a lot of people did miss Vine. Snapchat and Instagram didn’t come close to replacing it’s coolness and connected factor. Not to mention Vine was amazing for black culture. If you think the others replaced Vine then you probably aren’t a heavy social media user.
Everyone knows Snapchat is for “rogue” content. Like your random sketchy night out in college that you only send temporarily (the close friend feature on Instagram and DMs never replaced this fully).
Instagram is much more for funny content that is longer form or static (this goes serious static content and memes), some short form content (since it has grown with reels), and for clout. The gram has always been for clout first and foremost. I’m not posting my pictures of my new whip on Snapchat or Facebook.
Vine was the platform for the great short form collaboration that is equally silly, informative and cool. TikTok is having the exact same effect, but has a feed, comment section, and related video functionality that makes it even better.
I might be too naïve but being a new platform, evolved from Musical.ly, closer to the Gen-Z by just being something that their parents/teachers/"older" people won't use was the most determining factor in its explosion. So, Vine being bought and deeply connected by Twitter was definitely an issue for Vine.
Is it? I took a look at it after someone mentioned some days ago that it's available on the web, no account required. Searching for videos is pretty terrible, so I did want to create an account for more possibilities but that wasn't possible on the desktop. Then I installed Bluestacks, installed Tiktok, created a dummy account and took a proper look that time. The "For You" stuff was rather useless, so I searched for some good music (from a specific genre) and liked some videos which resulted in me being recommended more music of that genre. OK. Now, obviously, I wanted to see something more than just footage from groups performing, so I looked for some easy-to-find things and liked those. Made no difference for the "For You" recommendations though. Eventually, 2-3 other topics trickled in and completely replaced the music footage (despite me often watching to the end). Then I found out that you can mark videos as "not interested" by holding down the mouse button...which basically completely killed two topics because I'm not intersted in stupid captions or annoying effects. And apparently you can't block effects....or captions...or hashtags. Heck, I selected that video language filter option from the very beginning but it doesn't apply to the "Discover" part of the app at all and doesn't even work with the "For You" stuff properly. Why can't I directly filter out certain things? I can do so with creators and music apparently, but not with hashtags, videos from specific countries, videos in a specific language etc. Then there is also the issue with "not interested" not working most of the time. Only after doing that to Vietnamese military parade videos four times has it appeared to work. When it comes to meme videos, Corona and politics, it doesn't work at all, no matter how often I select it. I'm also stuck watching the same kind of videos over and over and over again. One would think the app would recommend something else entirely after someone sweeps at least 90% of the time immediately. Ah, also, the categories-that-you-like selection is utterly pointless too apparently. The only one I selected from the very beginning was "gaming" and out of hundreds of videos, there was only one which was gaming-related. Since the search function is terrible, I can't search for multiple hashtags or very specific things like "bla-bla". And single-hashtag is pointless since at least 95% of the videos I'm not interested in + there is the overlap of words of course. If I'm looking for the MSX computer, then I'm getting different results of course because "MSX" is a more popular thing for X and Y. Something else that I've noticed is that, possibly because of demographics, most of the videos feature girls/women, even something typically male-dominated like farming/agriculture is like 50/50 while everything else seems to be 90+%.
Anyway, just some ranting because I don't think I can understand why this is so popular, despite being so unusable. Granted, at best I would use it as an appetizer for proper content (like after listening to a good tune, looking for the full song or hearing/seeing some interesting tidbit and looking for more information). If people that talk aren't involved, it also rather reminds me of flash loops from days (more or less) gone by, just with terrible captions as an addition.
I like it because it just has stupid memes and jokes, and some cool recipes and stuff - it's easy to browse for 10 minutes on a break and it feels organic.
Instagram and YouTube etc. have all become incredibly corporate with professional production studios etc. dominating the platforms - I imagine the same might happen to TikTok eventually, but at the moment you can just see a funny video someone made of their cat, and the cat isn't sponsored by SquareSpace.
TikTok is popular for the same reason why Facebook was super popular back in the day; constantly checking for new short videos is akin to constantly checking for new status updates, new photo uploads and new DMs but now all that Facebook activity dissolved into various platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. On top of that it is easier for content creators to create short videos than for example 20 min long YouTube videos meaning barrier to entry is much lower.
Also teens and young people in general say that their parents and grandparents moved to Facebook because of which they do not feel comfortable doing all the shenanigans on the Facebook anymore.
Zuckerberg was genius and cursed at the same time because he created social network for everything or in another words for general content(text, photos, videos etc.) but he didn't specialize in any until recently when he and his team started paying attention to each and every of this content category.
I would recommend using it a bit more. The algorithm is generally pretty good, it just takes some time to learn your interests.
The reason they don't have all those filtering options is probably because most people don't want to use them and it's fun to see video content from all around the world and even in different languages. Serendipity on TikTok is part of the appeal.
Although it wasn't the case for you, I'd say TikTok probably has the best cold-start experience of any consumer content app. For comparison, try creating a new account on YouTube or IG.
Still get that TikTok may not be for everyone, but imo it feels like the end game design of short video content consumption. The content can be really fun, silly, pointless, mundane, or educational. You don't need to follow people. Celebs are not as relevant. Don't like something? Just swipe up. It's a pretty refreshing take.
It can't learn my interests if I don't see any new videos though. As I wrote, it's just the same over and over and over again. Usually one would mix in something completely different...which it doesn't do. That applies to the content and the music. And it's not like I'm not interested in things. On the contrary, my interests touch a large variety of topics but I never get a book recommendation, classical music played on different instruments, sports etc etc.
Actually, it starts you off with your native language only at first IIRC. I increased it to seven different ones which didn't matter at all and then decreased it to three. And again, no difference.
I don't use any social media and all the "celebrity" stuff is generally not for me at all. So I can't really compare the experience to anything.
Though, I guess I can attribute the success to what the others said, despite its demerits:
- really low barrier of entry (mrkramer)
- organic feeling, as opposed to corporate-controlled/generated (alexgmcm)
The addictive nature of seeing what comes next likely also plays a role.
As a typical "old guy" I just went over there to browse, as an experiment, and while I did find a neat (but too short) woodworking video that was kind of interesting, I generally agree: I don't know what I would get out of TikTok--it's mostly young people doing things that they understand and interest them. It's clearly not targeted at my demographic, and that's OK.
My only mild annoyance has been that sometimes my FYP gets stuck on a topic like golf that I really don’t like and it can take a while to get off of it. Otherwise the alg tends to send me a lot of small videos of stuff that’s extremely specific to very specific interests which is so much nicer. Searching for things and liking videos in those things tends to make those things show up on my FYP.
TikTok didn't fill a void, it's a fantastic video app that did a lot of things right. There was a lot of new video apps after Vine died, none of them were successful.