Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway-jim | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand this. I thought vine was going to be the next big thing right until the day they decided to shut it down.

View on HN

The fact that vine as a name and at least some vines are still at least somewhat prevalent online, makes me think that vine literally was "already" the next big thing and twitter just completely misread the room.

yeah, people are still reconnecting with vine creators, on TikTok. You can see in the comments, a video came up on the user's feed and they were compelled enough to be like "are you so and so from vine!?" Vine was killed half a decade ago.

And YouTube. Some of the biggest commentary channels used to be Viners.

The fact that it was shut down when it was is testament to how badly Twitter misplayed their hand with it. Every single creator flocked to whatever platform would take them at the time.

"Twitter supports videos now, therefore Vine is redundant! Shut it down and 100% of Vine users will post their videos on Twitter!"

—Twitter PMs, probably

If that's the rationale it has to be one of the worst tech product decisions in history. Out-doing even Googles collection of product shutdowns here.

I think it's a lot more likely that there are/were a horde of PMs there who thought it was a very dumb and short-sighted decision to shut it down at the time. In my experience, it's usually some high-ranking exec who makes confounding decisions through authority in big tech. Not so much the average IC PM who has to spend time understanding their users for their job.

Thanks for the reminder. Yes, this was pretty much 100% the rationale from Twitter at the time.

What was your position at Twitter at the time? I'm interested to know where you heard it from, to the extent that you can disclose.

The Vic Gundrota Google+ school of Product Management.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com