{FOR EVERYONE} Why is TikTok doing better than Vine ever did?

Unfortunately Vine is long dead, so it may not be a fair comparison, but it does raise a good question: Why is short form social video popular (now)?

Vine was a blank canvas, there was all kinds of content and the earliest days it was an ADHD fever dream (which I absolutely loved). It didn't seem to be an overt "direction" or UX nudge to create anything in particular.

I think what people most remember Vine for was the rise of entertainment and "skit humor" that seemed to work perfectly in 6.5 seconds of video.

Vine's value proposition was being extremely easy to record + edit (inline) + share short video. Yes, YouTube was already "a thing" but if you think about what it took to make a video in ~2005 it was probably too much work for most people. It was primarily shared via twitter, with its own feeds / social network seemingly unused by most users.

TikTok has a different value proposition and heritage.

• Direction to create specific kinds of content, which vastly lower the barrier to entry. IMO its easier to ask someone to create a remix / own-version of someone else's post, than it is to have a user stare at a blank screen.
• Heavy focus on licensed (ie real) music, with incentive to use it: Your post will be linked to others using the same song, and again lowers the barrier to creation-- the user doesn't need to think about audio at all.
• Huge head start with an existing teenage user base via the Musical.ly acquisition, which is also where a lot of the above core mechanics come from.
• Arguably world class user feed curation / recommendation engine, which people have discussed at length here on IH.

There's also the whole "innovators dilemma", Vine was an early mover, but maybe what it really was good at was getting people to see short videos as viable... After all, don't all social networks have it now?

Vine created a format, TikTok made the format addicting.

• Invested in more content creation and discovery vectors: video effects, music etc. that made creation and discovery easier
• Abundance of content ranked by a world-class algorithm = lots of entertaining gems for each user
• Disciplined management

Wrote about why TikTok is so addicting here: https://productlessons.substack.com/p/why-tiktok-is-so-addicting

TikTok has a massive ad budget and uses user-generated content on its ads. I felt like they forced TikTok into my throat with number of ads.

Arguably I would say that TikTok stands on the shoulders of Vine. Vine pioneered short form social video and had to do the legwork or figuring out the format and building an audience for it. Then when Vine was shut down it left a vacuum that lasted long enough to create a pent up demand for a similar service. Then TikTok was able to come to market focused on experimenting to figure out how to fine tune the idea versus establish demand for it in the first place.

it evokes primal emotions:

• attraction to women
• competitive urge towards men ("I could do that")

Tiktok is not doing better than Vine. Tiktok is in limelight because Vine is not here to give it competition.
Vine creators became stars on all other platforms. But I rarely seeing Tiktok stars ruling other content creation platform.

I think timing! I teach middle schoolers, and Tik Tok makes YouTube-like stardom more accessible to non-influencers. It's more democratized. Plus, it's just fun and a little more focused than Vine. That's my two-cents. :-D

vine also had trouble filtering out the huge amount of low-quality content from the "good" one. Nowadays our algorithms are much better at generating feeds of content specifically tailored to the user.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that it could have Chinese, possibly government influence. It was already a popular app in China under the name Douyin.

It's more fun to say TikTok than Vine