As we noted earlier this week, Vine is now dead. The app, which was bought by Twitter back in 2012, is being shut down in a series of moves by Twitter meant to save money .
If you ask some of the “Vine stars,” they think that the reason the app shut down is because they left the app.
Uh, yeah, sure.
According to Buzzfeed, the Vine stars made a proposal: If Vine would pay all 18 of them $1.2 million each, roll out several product changes and open up a more direct line of communication, everyone in the room would agree to produce 12 pieces of monthly original content for the app, or three vines per week.
The names attached were names you know and love: Logan Paul, Alx James, Marcus Johns and King Bach. The best of the best. Once Vine and Twitter came back and said no, they left and took their talents to other apps like Snapchat and Instagram.
One of the biggest changes they wanted was a way to censor abusive commenters. Piques spoke to Mic about that very topic.
“People on Vine would bash people for no reason, we wanted comment filters so we could block words like the F-word from our comments. Vine eventually rolled out some types of filters, but the broad consensus was that it was too little too late.”
It couldn’t have been that some of these “stars” were one-trick ponies that had no idea what they were doing, oftentimes making racist or homophobic videos.
The sweet spot for the app was sharing videos that were in the moment and viral in nature, capturing small snippets similarly to a disposable camera. Those moments and the people using them are what made Vine big in the first place. These leeches trying to take credit for the app’s demise are missing the point. People want something genuine, and these Vine stars were anything but.
This wasn’t about money that should’ve been given to them, this is about an app that couldn’t differentiate itself from some titans of the industry. The app had a cultural impact on the nation, just not in the way some of it’s biggest stars believed.
