The Death of Vine Makes the Internet a Worse Place ⇥ nymag.com

Just before today’s Apple event, Twitter announced that Vine would, effectively, be shutting down “in the coming months”.

Brian Feldman wrote a bit of a eulogy for New York magazine:

But the point of Vine was never to generate the next Fellini. It was to have dumb, stupid free play on an internet increasingly hostile to that kind of freedom, whether because of surveillance or heavy-handed advertiser presence or trolls. The lack of adult supervision or corporate culture may have made it somewhat impenetrable, but it also made it feel free in a way no other social network really does. And that freedom paid off. In terms of creating phrases, ideas, and images that made it into mainstream culture — that is, memes — Vine was unparalleled. If you’ve heard, or said, or been baffled by “I was told by Apple Care!” or “on fleek” or “what are those,” you’ve encountered a Vine in the wild.

The best Vines had more creativity and laughs per second than most sitcoms or movies.

This is also notable:

Most important, the engines of this creativity were groups poorly served by, and often shut out from, mainstream cultural creation and consumption. Vine wasn’t just dominated by teenagers — it was dominated by teenagers of color. Especially black teens, who created a disproportionate number of popular Vines and used the social network to demonstrate wit, intelligence, creativity, and comic timing that was rarely given a spotlight elsewhere.