Vine: How Six-Second Loops Rewired the Internet and Then Vanished

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Twitter paid a reported 30 million dollars for Vine in October 2012, before the public could even download it. Founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll had built the visual equivalent of a tweet: six seconds of looping video, recorded only while a thumb pressed the screen. Launched on January 24, 2013, it was the top free app in the iOS App Store by April. That touch-to-record design put jump cuts and stop motion in anyone's hands, and soon Vine was pushing an obscure rap track to number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and documenting the Ankara embassy bombing and the Ferguson protests.

This episode follows the rise, collapse, and strange afterlife of the app. Vine minted memes and stars at a furious pace but never built a way to pay the people making them. When Instagram and Snapchat offered longer video and advertisers followed, more than half of its top creators left in the first six months of 2016. Twitter ended uploads that October and later shut down the archive. The story closes with Divine, a decentralized revival announced by Jack Dorsey that restores up to 200,000 original Vines.

• Artist Angela Washko sold a Vine to a collector for 200 dollars in March 2013, delivered on a thumb drive, the first Vine sold as fine art.
• Kayla Lewis coined the phrase eyebrows on fleek in 2014 and watched celebrities and brands use it while she saw none of the profits.
• Brandon Moore, whose What Are Those video drew 40 million loops, felt sick when the joke appeared in Black Panther; he died in 2018 at age 31.
• Dom Hofmann launched a successor called Byte in 2020, which was renamed Clash and then Huddles before shutting down in May 2023.
• Divine, built by Evan Henshaw-Plath and launched in April 2026, runs on the Nostr protocol and uses Proof Mode to verify that videos were shot by humans.