A lot of people have been asking the smart and fair question why Twitter let Vine die when it was clearly the pre-cursor to TikTok. So as a former Twitter employee who had a front row seat, I thought it would be helpful to spill some tea. A 🧵
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I often dream of a universe where Twitter not only kept Vine but somehow acquired Instagram. Some really cool synergies that would have resulted in something better than Meta’s Frankenstein’s monster.
In my opinion we made two big mistakes that led to the eventual failure of Vine. 1. Twitter never invested in music rights. Music rights are incredibly expensive, and by the time Vine was taking off and people were using music in the background of their content, negotiating would have been $$$
When I joined in 2013 eng was working on the Twitter Music app. What was shipped was a shell of what it could have been. They released a music app that couldn't actually play music unless you connected it to another music playing account.
I remember a PM coming and showing me https://musical.ly well before bytedance acquired them and I always wondered if Twitter had been thinking of buying them too.
Omg. I remember being in a room with a lawyer and a PM showing the the music app and they almost had a stroke. The were rightfully concerned the labels were about to sue us for stolen music and then we built that app without buying the rights 🤦🏻♀️
That said, we should have done it! Music was integral in the early success of TikTok. All those pandemic TikTok dances were possible bc ByteDance was smart and negotiated with the labels upfront. TikTok has gone on to be a massive source for music discovery. So we should have bit the bullet.
2nd mistake was not prioritizing a creator monetization program early. Vine stars were smart and saw the impact they were having on the platform and fairly wanted to get compensated for their content. Twitter/Vine largely ignored this, and pissed off that burgeoning creator community.
Twitter went on after Vine to have a really successful program called Amplify, modeled after YouTube which paired pre-role ads ahead of premium content. Which was win-win for both the platform and the content creators. Vine should have prio’d finding a sustainable business model for creators.
Anyway. All this is to say, it’s not that Twitter didn’t see the value in shortform video. We just didn’t build it in a way to make it sustainable. And we created a world where tiktok could come in and learn from and benefit from our mistakes.
I don’t know how much this matters in contrast to business/product failures but I heard the underlying infrastructure was also really bad and the founders may have had a good touch of rest and vest mentality
This feels the rawest and closest to that. Once they concoct an algorithm and the homework of making sense of it reduces to make it easier for onboarding, the less exciting it'll be.
Since you know a lot more than me in these type of environments, how hard is it to get account notifications when others post, from a developing standpoint? I'm really liking bluesky but I'm going back to Twitter because I'm not as instantly notified on accounts (news) as I am there & I miss a lot
It was messy and glorious and never seemed intentionally malign. It got me a job at a business that relied on Twitter. As much as mega star creators are important it was the world changing information that emerged on Twitter that mattered. Tens of thousands of unheard before voices finding an outlet
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Hindsight is 20/20
I wonder what insights blue is missing which will sound so obvious in future.