Goodbye Vine

     Vine, the 6-second app we all loved and treasured, is sadly leaving the app store. On October 26th, Twitter said it would shut down Vine’s mobile app sometime in the next few months. But what everyone has been asking is why?

     The main issue was that the managers of Vine were struggling to make money, due to the lack of people downloading the app from the app store. Although once one of the most successful apps on the market, Vine failed to keep pace as competitors added more and more unique features which attracted the most popular viners. Without the new generation creating more vines, Vine slowly began to lose people to other more popular, updated apps like Instagram and Snapchat.  A tech reporter who covers Twitter for The Times said Thursday “Vine never recovered from Instagram’s video launch a few years back. That threat of stealing users and market share was real, and it worked.”

     While existing Vines will remain on the web, no new ones can be created. Vine said that it would figure out ways for users to keep and store their favorite vines. “We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,” the company wrote on Medium. “You’ll be able to access and download your Vines.”

     However, with this decision comes the pushback from viners and viewers alike. Popular viner Melanie Bracewell tweeted, “You can rip my 4 million vine loops out of my cold dead hands”, a pretty comical response to the situation. Other viners like TheGabbieShow tweeted, “vine being deleted is like an old friend I haven’t really talked to in a while dying and even though we weren’t close anymore it hurts to see them go”, something most viners can agree on.

     Though Vine was a great outlet for creative teens to upload 6-second videos about any topic, other apps like Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Twitter and thousands of others are still available and constantly evolving. Who knows, maybe these apps will learn something from Vine and create something similar? Either way, it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend and remember the Vines that once ruled the Internet.