Vine, the short-form video app introduced in 2012, died as it lived: confusing people who didn’t use it, even as evidence of its influence surrounded them. It turned everyday people into stars on other platforms and beyond. Its musical whims warped the music industry. It cultivated memes that might have been dismissed as inside jokes if not for their tendency to flourish outside the app.
It was imitated by much larger competitors and, in death, served as a template for a new, similarly puzzling and even more powerful generation of short-form video apps. Its end, announced in 2016, was a muddled one: Was Vine mismanaged by Twitter, its parent company? Did it fail to support its most popular users? Did its novelty wear off? All of the above?
Twitter euthanized Vine before other services had time to kill it, leaving Viners, and their fans, to disperse. As much as apps like TikTok owe to Vine, none provided anything like continuity, leaving some Vine users with the feeling that something was still missing from the internet.
Vine是2012年推出的一款短格式视频应用程序，它生前就已经死了：让不使用它的人感到困惑，甚至有证据表明它的影响力已经包围了他们。它把日常生活中的人们变成了其他平台上的明星。它的音乐奇想扭曲了音乐产业。它培养出的模因，如果不是因为它们在应用程序之外的蓬勃发展，可能会被当作内部笑话而不予理会。
它被更大的竞争对手模仿，在死亡中，它成为了一个新的模板，同样令人费解，甚至更强大的一代短格式视频应用程序。它在2016年宣布的结局是一个混乱的结局：Vine是否被其母公司Twitter管理不善？它是否未能支持最受欢迎的用户？它的新奇感消失了吗？所有这些？
Twitter在其他服务还没来得及杀掉Vine之前就对它实施了安乐死，让viner和他们的粉丝们散去。像TikTok这样的应用程序都是Vine的功劳，但没有一个提供了连续性这样的功能，这让一些Vine用户感到互联网上仍然缺少一些东西。
“The idea was to bring back what people remember about Vine, even if it isn’t necessarily the way that Vine was,” said Dom Hofmann, a founder of Vine, in a phone interview. His new app, Byte, was released in January.
Beyond the 6-second looping videos, Byte’s design refers heavily to Vine, with a familiar search and discovery page and even the same prompt for commenters: “Say something nice.”
Like our phones, the videos have gotten taller; like our phones’ cameras, they’re sharper and more realistic, too. “If you were to bring back Vine as it was when it shut down, today, it would feel pretty dated,” Hofmann, 33, said.
Instead, Byte feels almost like a tribute. With stripped-down creation tools, no filters, no music integration and a user base that includes some returning Viners, the videos, in subject and style, tend to lean on what worked on Vine: short comedy clips and formal experiments with looping.
Vine的创始人DomHofmann在一次电话采访中说：“我们的想法是让人们回忆起人们对Vine的记忆，即使它不一定像Vine那样。”。他的新应用程序Byte在1月份发布。
除了6秒的循环视频外，Byte的设计主要指的是Vine，它有一个熟悉的搜索和发现页面，甚至还有一个相同的评论提示：“说点好话。”
像我们的手机一样，视频也变得更高；像我们手机的摄像头一样，它们也更锐利，更逼真。33岁的霍夫曼说：“如果你能让葡萄树恢复到它关闭时的样子，今天，它会感觉很过时。”。
相反，Byte感觉像是一个贡品。由于精简的创作工具，没有过滤器，没有音乐集成，用户群包括一些回归的viner，视频，在主题和风格上，往往依赖于Vine上的工作：短喜剧剪辑和正式的循环实验。
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As telling are the ways it doesn’t feel like newer video apps — in particular TikTok, the undisputed short-video app of the moment and, at least in the popular imagination, Vine’s de facto replacement.
TikTok supports longer videos and is less reliant on a simple follower model, instead employing assertive and opaque recommendations. It is loaded with a constantly changing set of creation tools, encouraging users to record to songs, riff on other users’ content and engage with challenges, hashtags and trends.
TikTok’s interface is busy, and feedback is constant. It’s all but openly spammy, and its engagement-pumping tactics can read as cynical, though it also shares in the wealth of attention that it helps generate; TikTok, more than anywhere else, is the platform where creators understand that they can gain traction fast, at least for now. (It is also backed by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, which plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising on rival platforms.)
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它不像是新的视频应用，尤其是TikTok，这是目前无可争议的短视频应用，至少在大众的想象中，Vine事实上是替代者。
TikTok支持较长的视频，并且不太依赖于简单的跟随者模型，而是采用自信和不透明的推荐。它加载了一套不断变化的创作工具，鼓励用户录制歌曲，即兴演唱其他用户的内容，并参与挑战，标签和趋势。
TikTok的界面很忙，反馈是恒定的。这几乎是公开的垃圾邮件，它的参与泵策略可以解读为愤世嫉俗，尽管它也分享了它帮助产生的大量关注；TikTok比其他任何地方都更是创作者理解他们可以快速获得牵引力的平台，至少目前是这样。（它也得到了中国互联网巨头ByteDance的支持，后者在竞争对手平台上投入了数亿美元的广告投入。）
Byte has no ByteDance; Hofmann, who is also one of the app’s main coders, describes the team, and operation, as “fairly small.”
The week it became publicly available, Byte was briefly the most downloaded app in the App Store, crossing 1 million downloads. TikTok users who decided to give Byte a try may have found it sleepy, stripped down and even a bit out of date. For former Vine users, the message was clearer: Stay awhile and see what people come up with.
As downloads surged, spammers took notice, flooding comment sections on videos. Creators, confronted with a large and largely disoriented audience, began trying to figure out what to do in a space that, despite its rigid limitations, feels, in 2020, like an intimidatingly blank canvas.
A core group of early users got to work, posting frequently, trying new things and figuring out what worked, or could work.
Eric Dunn was among them. He joined Vine when he was in college; within four months of his first post, he had 1 million followers. He became one of the platform’s early stars, producing hundreds of comedy videos and establishing a foundation for a career in entertainment.
Byte没有ByteDance；Hofmann也是应用程序的主要编码人员之一，他将团队和操作描述为“相当小”。
在公开发布的那一周，Byte是应用商店中下载量最高的应用，下载量超过100万次。决定尝试一下Byte的TikTok用户可能发现它很困，甚至有点过时。对于以前的Vine用户来说，这条信息更为清晰：请稍等，看看人们有什么想法。
下载量激增，垃圾邮件发送者注意到了，视频上的评论区充斥。创作者们面对着大量的、基本上迷失方向的观众，开始想办法在一个空间里做些什么，尽管这个空间有着严格的限制，但在2020年，感觉就像是一张吓人的空白画布。
一组早期的核心用户开始工作，频繁地发帖，尝试新事物，找出哪些有用，哪些可能有用。
埃里克·邓恩也在其中。他在大学时加入了Vine，在他第一次任职的4个月内，他就有了100万追随者。他成为该平台的早期明星之一，制作了数百部喜剧视频，并为娱乐事业奠定了基础。
After Vine went out of business, some of its most notable alumni went to YouTube; Dunn, instead, has spread his influence across Instagram, sports media and modelling.
He’s interested in TikTok, where he has a modest following, but he’s not totally sure how to approach it. (For one, said Dunn, who is now 27, “everyone is in high school.”) He was happy to hear about Byte. “All the things I’m doing today are a direct result of Vine,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this app to come out.”
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In Byte’s early-user group, he noticed a number of former Viners. Some listed Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in their bios. Others were back for Byte alone.
“I don’t think anything has changed that much,” Dunn said. His Byte videos wouldn’t be far out of place on his old Vine feed. “I think I’m picking up where I left off.”
Vine停业后，一些最著名的校友上了YouTube；相反，邓恩已经将他的影响力传播到了Instagram、体育媒体和模特界。
他对提克托克很感兴趣，在那里他有一个谦虚的追随者，但他不完全确定如何接近它。（比如，现年27岁的邓恩说：“每个人都在上高中。”）他很高兴听到字节的事。他说：“我今天所做的一切都是葡萄树的直接结果。“我一直在等待这个应用程序发布。”
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在Byte的早期用户组中，他注意到一些以前的viner。一些人在他们的bios中列出了Instagram、TikTok和YouTube。其他人则独自返回。
邓恩说：“我认为没有什么变化那么大。他的字节视频在他以前的Vine feed上不会太不合适。“我想我是在弥补我的不足。”
If Byte succeeds, it will take time. Vine, after an early explosion of interest, needed about a year to figure itself out, and another year to really hit its stride. Since Vine died, users’ phones have only gotten more crowded, and their attention more divided.
What may matter more, however, is how new video creators see the platform. Vine spent its final years in conflict with some of its biggest stars, and never figured out how to help them make money.
“People just forgot about Vine and moved to TikTok,” said Messiah D. Agurs, who was a child (7 years old) when he joined Vine and is now 13.
Byte has pitched itself directly to the people it hopes will stock it with things for people to watch. The app’s founders plan to open a partnership program, which in its early days will pass 100% of advertising revenue to participants. (“I guarantee when Byte starts to pay creators everyone will instantly move to the app,” Messiah said.) Byte has been soliciting user feedback on a public forum for months, explaining even minor changes to the platform.
如果字节成功，就需要时间。Vine在经历了早期的兴趣爆炸后，需要一年左右的时间来解决问题，而另一年则需要真正的大踏步。自从Vine死后，用户的手机变得更加拥挤，他们的注意力更加分散。
然而，更重要的是，新的视频制作者如何看待这个平台。维恩在最后的几年里与一些最伟大的明星发生了冲突，一直没有想出如何帮助他们赚钱。
“人们只是忘记了Vine，搬到了提克托克，”弥赛亚D.阿古斯说，他加入Vine时还是个孩子（7岁），现在13岁。
Byte已经把自己直接推销给了它希望能为人们提供观看物品的人。这款应用的创始人计划开设一个合作项目，初期将把广告收入的100%转嫁给参与者。（“我保证当Byte开始向开发者付费时，每个人都会立即使用这款应用，”弥赛亚说）Byte已经在一个公共论坛上征集用户的反馈意见好几个月了，甚至解释了平台的一些小改动。
These forums are where the material changes of the last half-decade are most evident. If Vine struggled to figure out what to do with a nascent class of content creators, Byte has arrived in a world in which “creator” is an established job title and where those professionals have a long list of demands.
Right away, Byte users began trading tips about maximizing engagement and sharing advice about when and what to post. They noticed others engaging in low-stakes influence trading, with informal “engagement groups” and reposting agreements, and asked the company to step in.
An account popped up to call out Byte users who it said were mimicking popular content on TikTok, gaining an unfair edge. Users worried about their metrics, which fell off but stabilized after an early flood of interest. Hofmann has found this feedback helpful, mostly.
“Of course it’s surprising,” he said. There doesn’t yet exist a popular, scalable system for paying short-form video creators, he noted, and knowing what creators are anxious about now, as opposed to half a decade ago, is obviously valuable.
The creators showing the most early promise aren’t too caught up in metrics and growth tactics, Hofmann said, although of course they care about that stuff too.
To most of us, Byte is an app that we’ll either enjoy or ignore. To a few — the creators it needs — it’s a strange new kind of bet on a job that may be great or may not exist, in an office that’s still being built.
