What can you possibly create with 6 seconds of action? That’s hardly enough time for someone to finish a decent sentence, let alone carry out a respectable plot. Despite the clear time related obstacles, the 6 second video app known as Vine was once an interactive outlet for the world’s most creative iphone-equipped individuals. Magic tricks, physical comedy, and the most masterful uses of puns in internet history (my personal favorite). The ideas flowed like a river of innovation, and the users grew exponentially in the app’s first few months. The more users involved, the more opportunities for people to test their time-crunched creative capabilities and produce what they hoped would catch on in the world of 6 second magic. The posts that were deemed the most outstanding would ascend to the “popular page” solely based on the amount of likes the video received from vine users. While every user was given the role of a critic with the like button acting as the sole indication of “shareability”, there was no actual function that let users share their favorite videos. What seemed like an easy fix and a potential gateway for video popularity turned out to be the chief contributor to the app’s demise. Just like the people in I am Legend thought it would be a good idea to release the cure for cancer, Vine released its own zombie inflictive disease. This colossal error is known well as “revining.”
Users figured, why create my own story when I can easily just share my favorites on my own page?! This was the exact type of thinking that opened the floodgates of unoriginality, lack of creativity, and an overall laziness that has rapidly and harshly destroyed the app that we all grew to love. Gone are the days where timelines were filled with attempts of art (some noble some admittedly atrocious), as we are now forced to scroll through dozens of twerks (from DUDES), smack cams, played out black jokes, countless 6 second song covers, sweepstakes for new itouches, and incentive videos (100,000 revines and i’ll chop off my right nut and sell my sister to a french human trafficking kingpin).
The cautionary tale that Vine presents is that creativity and originality die when users are rewarded for accumulating enough “revines” or shares at the hands of lazy iphone-wielding fools. In other words, creativity becomes impossible when people are told what trends indicate are funny. So the next time you open up vine, try coming up with your own unique brand of humor instead of simply passing along watered down versions of ideas that have been dragged out since the inception of this post-glory days wasteland. Hey who knows? Maybe your creation will gain enough revines to make it to the popular page and see itself mediocrely recreated and watered down tweens across the land. But beware. The perils of falling into vine’s unoriginal quicksand is a cautionary tale on par with the classic German tale of “The story of little suck-a-thumb.”
If you aren't happy with the people on social media sites you might also like this article we wrote a while back
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