6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)

Summary

Podcast Summary

---

Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World

Episode 6: VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Host: Benedict Townsend (with guests Mary Goodheart, Karen, Chris Melburger, Kenny Knox, Rich Arnold, Brendan McNerney, Russ)
Date: April 29, 2025

Overview of Episode

This episode examines the rise of Vine’s most influential creators, dubbed the "Very Important Viners" (VIVs), and the internal battles that unfolded as Vine struggled to keep its star users—and itself—afloat amid increasing competition and mounting internal dysfunction. The episode details Vine's attempts to repair creator relations, innovate in design, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the often uneasy relationship with parent company Twitter. The build-up culminates in a dramatic confrontation between Vine’s top creators and leadership that tested the platform’s survival.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Viner Dilemma: Popularity vs. Platform Health

[00:02–02:36]

• Vine’s most prominent creators, particularly from the "1600 Vine" apartment, came to dominate the platform, often at the expense of diversity in content.
  • The Vine staff were uneasy: viral but often low-brow and controversial content was integral to engagement, but also damaging to the brand.
  • Mary Goodheart: “They kind of felt held hostage… if we get rid of this, then the creator will be annoyed, and will go, and they'll take all these users with them.” [01:03]
  • Revine-for-revine strategies and algorithm mastery cemented this small group's dominance.
  • Benedict Townsend: “It's like when a doctor's like, we have to leave the bullet in or it will do more damage.” [01:37]
• The effect was a creative monoculture, stifling new and alternative voices and limiting platform growth.

2. The Power—and Plight—of Viner Creators

[02:36–05:10]

• Despite being the engine of Vine’s popularity, top creators were largely unsupported by Vine HQ, fueling animosity.
  • Karen, a new content team leader, observed: “None of these creators were even getting the most basic of technical support... And it really created this animosity for the app.” [03:54]
  • Creators rejected the "Viner" label because they “did not feel associated with the company they had become famous for.”
• Karen's approach: rebuilding trust, verifying her identity, and personally reaching out to creators who’d experienced years of “closed doors and silence.”

3. Nurturing Talent: The Three-Tiered System

[05:10–06:25]

• Karen implemented a structured approach:
  • VIVs (Very Important Viners): Top, established stars (often “too rich and too angry to turn”).
  • Ivy Leagues: Middle-tier, talented up-and-comers, easier to work with and the next likely stars.
  • Sprouts: Rising new talents showing promise with fresh comedic approaches.
  • Karen: “We had creator people at that point that were really doing well with the sprouts... just the Viv's that we felt like we were never going to be able to turn our way.” [05:25]
• The focus was shifting to nurture the next generation before the star creators jumped ship.

4. Bringing Creators into the Fold—From Mole to Mentor

[06:25–08:38]

• Karen recruited Chris Melburger (a prominent Viner) to work with creators, spot emerging talent, and foster positive content:
  • Chris Melburger: “It was kind of my job to, like, keep an eye on anyone who had, like, potential or was blowing up or doing well...feature some of their stuff on certain channels to...get new eyes on someone...” [07:33]
  • Special features: curated playlists, creator spotlights, and smaller-scale events to make lesser-known creators feel seen.

5. Real-World Community-Building and Creators’ Perspective

[08:38–11:18]

• Efforts to rebuild community included events, travel, and creative support, often circumventing Vine’s inability to pay creators directly.
  • Kenny Knox (Ivy League Viner): “She flew all of us out to Wisconsin…We went to Disney, they rented out Denny’s and IHOP…free merch and our own panel.” [09:08]
  • Karen personally found loopholes to pay creators for attending events.
  • Kenny Knox: “One of them events, she paid all of us like $6,000. I was just like, I am a kid, I just graduated high school…” [10:24]
  • Karen’s support extended post-Vine: helping creators find managers and work.
  • Kenny Knox: “Karen and Goat…done a lot for me and I’m forever thankful…” [11:12]
  • Brendan McNerney (former Viner): “[Karen] was the fairy godmother of Vine…It was a signal to creators that they are now taken seriously—not just as creators, but as a career.” [11:30]

6. A New Era…or a Betrayal of Vine’s Roots?

[11:18–13:23]

• While new management brought positivity, some questioned if Vine’s original anarchic, creative magic was fading.
  • Mary Goodheart: “What we're talking about here, it sounds so positive…but is this the Vine that we love?… It's a completely different beast.” [12:41–13:23]
  • Vine began to shift focus: from a chaotic creative tool, to a more curated, talent-driven platform.

7. Desperate Innovation: Breaking the Six-Second Rule

[13:23–18:00]

• Vine’s surgically concise six-second format, once revolutionary, was seen as a limitation in a world now flooded with video competition: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube.
  • Rich Arnold (Vine design): “It felt like you could only innovate so much within six seconds…we were effectively eliminating kinds of content that would have been nice…” [15:30]
• Vine finally increased the max video length—to 140 seconds, purely to match Twitter’s character limit.
  • Rich Arnold: “At the time, we decided to match what Twitter's max length was, which is like an asinine way to decide what the optimal video length is.” [17:00]
  • Mary Goodheart, on the arbitrary decision: “I genuinely thought that us asking about how they landed on new length was going to lead to a sort of comically complex thing…[but] we'll match Twitter.” [17:19]
• Vine introduced a recommended feed (algorithmic), moving away from the “monoculture” of the popular page and embracing the model that TikTok would later perfect.
  • Rich Arnold: “If we had actually embraced a recommended feed earlier and actually done recommendation, well, it would have been interesting…” [18:25]

8. Struggles of Being Twitter’s “Stepchild”

[18:57–25:48]

• Vine was always an afterthought in Twitter’s eyes—a small, under-resourced team ("60 people vs. thousands").
  • Karen: “Vine was essentially the redheaded stepchild of Twitter. Very few people who worked at Twitter used Vine, understood Vine, were fluent in Vine.” [20:42]
• Twitter’s actions, including acquiring and prioritizing Periscope, worsened the working relationship.
• Historic missteps: Twitter’s stubbornness during the Instagram acquisition led them to promise Vine's founders autonomy, leading to a divided relationship from the start.
  • Karen: “…the founders had come in kind of saying, like, we want your money, but we don't want to be on your team. And because the founders had that philosophy, it trickled down.” [24:13]
• Integration with Twitter was half-hearted; features that could have helped Vine weren’t fully exploited.

9. The Platform Death Spiral and Lost Magic

[25:48–30:40]

• User numbers stagnated; the platform suffered the classic social media “death spiral.”
  • Rich Arnold: “People are showing up less, so people are posting less, so people show up less, so people post less.” [27:44]
• Creators became aware of Vine’s downward trajectory—many were preparing to migrate their audiences to other platforms.
  • Brendan McNerney: “I remember there was an inflection point where engagement just dropped so bad…Either it's going to get really bad or really good…If it's really bad, I want to squeeze all the juice and all the followers I can out of this…” [29:40]
• Competitors (Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube) lacked Vine’s magic but offered more features and convenience; Vine failed to keep up.

10. Last-Ditch Community and the Looming Showdown

[30:40–35:33]

• Karen attempted a bold PR move by organizing the first ever Vine-hosted celebration for King Bach, letting him handle the guest list—a bid to mend fences with top creators.
  • Karen: “Throw a huge party to celebrate King Bach and...have him invite everybody because nobody was responding to me…first ever vine hosted party for Viners.” [31:37]
• The party was both a “defiant positivity” and a symbolic olive branch.
  • Chris Melburger: “It was like the first time some of the biggest Viners and some of the smallest ones…were all in one area together mingling and just talking…” [33:21]
  • Karen: “It was really like beautiful and heartwarming and…we are the new people and it's going to be a friendlier place for you now.” [34:01]
• But after the party, a meeting was summoned by the VIVs—a confrontation with Vine management brewing.
  • Karen: “Marcus Johns came over to me and said, hey, everybody from 1600 vine would like to meet with you.” [34:33]
  • The episode ends on the threat: the top Viners realizing their collective power and preparing to make demands—setting up the next chapter in Vine’s tumultuous history.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mary Goodheart, on platform stagnation:
  “They kind of felt held hostage...if we get rid of this, then the creator will be annoyed, and will go, and they'll take all these users with them.” [01:03]

• Karen, on underappreciated creators:
  “There's so much that goes into understanding how to be on top...It's not an easy thing to not only excel at, but then to stay at the top of the game, because algorithms are constantly changing.” [02:47]

• Chris Melburger, on creator outreach:
  “It was kind of my job to, like, keep an eye on anyone who had...potential...feature some of their stuff on certain channels to, you know, get new eyes on someone in a way that felt organic.” [07:33]

• Kenny Knox, on Karen’s support:
  “She gave us all community tabs, like Spotlight pages and we all got featured. And then when people download the vine app, our accounts will pop up on the suggested accounts.” [09:08]

• Brendan McNerney, on a new creator culture:
  “Karen made me want to become an ambassador for Vine…It was a signal to creators that they are now taken seriously—not just as creators, but as a career.” [11:30]

• Rich Arnold, on extending video length:
  “At the time, we decided to match what Twitter's max length was, which is like an asinine way to decide what the optimal video length is.” [17:00]

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:03] — The dilemma of popular but problematic creators
• [03:54] — Vine’s lack of creator support
• [05:25] — Karen outlines her "VIVs, Ivy Leagues, Sprouts" talent strategy
• [07:33] — Chris Melburger describes his new hybrid role (“mole” inside the community)
• [09:08] — Kenny Knox on the new support and recognition for creators
• [10:24] — How Karen found ways to pay creators
• [11:30] — Brendan McNerney on the “fairy godmother” era
• [15:30] — Rich Arnold discusses the painful decision to extend the six-second limit
• [17:00] — The arbitrary 140-second new limit
• [18:25] — Designing the algorithmic recommended feed
• [20:42] — Vine as Twitter’s “redheaded stepchild”
• [24:13] — How the Instagram acquisition influenced Vine's own integration struggles
• [29:40] — Creators bracing for Vine’s end
• [31:37] — Karen’s King Bach party as a culture-shifting event
• [34:33] — 1600 Vine’s creators demand a private meeting—climax and cliffhanger

---

Tone and Style

The episode is candid, at times bittersweet, and laced with a sense of nostalgia, wistfulness, and frustration. Guests reflect openly about the chaos, the missed opportunities, and the fleeting moments of creative magic and community. Benedict’s narration blends humor and empathy, balancing insider perspectives with the broader cultural lens.

---

Conclusion

Episode 6 captures the critical moment when Vine teetered between revolution and collapse—caught between the titanic egos and ambitions of its most influential creators, the limitations (and arbitrary decisions) of its leadership, and the chilling shadow of its indifferent parent company, Twitter. Ultimately, it’s the story of innovation colliding with reality, and a battle over who truly owns the soul of a platform: its architects or its stars.

Next episode: The VIVs make their dramatic ultimatum—will Vine survive?

Transcript

[Benedict Townsend]

This is a global player original podcast. Last time on vine, six seconds that changed the world. It's code red to protect morale. The digital board displaying daily user stats that's up in vinehq had quietly been taken down. Vine is spiraling. Of course, none of this is helped by Instagram's rival push into video. All three of the app's founders leaving in quick succession, growing discontent from Vine's top creators, A general disregard of the app by its own parent company, Twitter, who has, by the way, just undergone a brutal series of layoffs. But aside from all that, yeah, things are going great. Why do you ask? Let's discuss this dilemma. Right, because the 1600 Viners are now completely dominating the platform. And is that necessarily a problem? Because they're attracting huge numbers of viewers, huge numbers of loops, as they said on Vine. And on the surface at least you would go, okay, well, happy vine users equals happy vine, right? But not really, no.

[Mary Goodheart]

There were kind of two problems with this for a lot of the vine staff. They actively disliked the content that was being produced. And it's not just a matter of different taste in comedy. They would have liked something more high brow. There were real concerns that there was content that was quite racist, quite misogynistic. They didn't want this stuff there. And the problem was because these videos were now accounting for such a big proportion of vine usage, they kind of felt held hostage. They would have liked to have got rid of them in the way the platforms would now, but they felt like, well, if we get rid of this, then the creator will be annoyed and will go, and they'll take all of these users with them.

[Benedict Townsend]

They were kind of load bearing, weren't they? It was like, we don't like this incredibly popular section of the app. It's like when a doctor's like, we have to leave the bullet in or it will do more damage. How can you fix the platform if removing this group will kill the platform?

[Mary Goodheart]

And then the other problem is, yeah, sure, they are accounting for a huge proportion of the user base, but they're also now dominating it such a way that nothing else can grow. And so even if their proportion is huge, that doesn't make up for all the potential users that you've just lost because everything else has kind of died.

[Benedict Townsend]

They have all the views, but mainly because they've got these revine for revine systems.

[Mary Goodheart]

They've got great strategy.

[Benedict Townsend]

You know, these are very successful people in their own right. I don't want to put them down too much, but they have Strategized their way to the top.

[Mary Goodheart]

Yeah. In the meantime, it means the platform has become this sort of single, quite homogenous thing. They've narrowed it to one kind of comedy, and there's no space for the rest of the comedy to grow. Now, the dilemma that Karen has is how do we change that without removing the bullet and bleeding out?

[Benedict Townsend]

Karen instantly recognized something that had been long overlooked at VineHQ. Just because content from top creators was characteristically immature, that didn't mean they shouldn't be taken seriously.

[Karen]

You know, everybody just waves them off like, oh, how great and easy it must be to just take a video of yourself and an outfit and make millions of dollars. There's so much that goes into understanding how to be on top. They not only have to have a good grasp of the of content creation, but most of them are very fluent in the science of algorithms. And this is why I find it laughable that influencers are so dismissed in entertainment and captivating eyeballs and audiences. It's not an easy thing to not only excel at, but then to stay at the top of the game, because algorithms are constantly changing. Apps are constantly changing the way they do things in ways that the staff didn't really even understand. But the creators, they knew what their top loop vine was. They knew what their average loops, where they had all of the statistics down. And there was also an app called Rank Zoo, which was like their bible, and they would go every day to see where they ranked in the system.

[Benedict Townsend]

While Viners were taking their work very seriously, the app itself seemed, by contrast, to be basically just a bit of a mess.

[Karen]

None of these creators were even getting the most basic of technical support. And the vine app, in the beginning, before I joined, was, like, crashing constantly. They would spend all this time making a video, and then they would have nothing to show for, like, a full day of content creation. They were getting no support. And so it really created this animosity for the app, which is why when vine stars started being called Viners, they absolutely did not want that label because they didn't feel associated with the company that they had become famous for.

[Benedict Townsend]

So Karen set to work trying to change things, unfortunately carrying the weighty baggage of years of neglect and dissatisfaction.

[Karen]

There was, you know, definitely a bunch of weird tension and weird energy that I was trying to sort out and figure out, like, who am I here and what is my place and what is my goal? In the first couple of months of my employment there, no one would respond to me, because no vine creator believed that someone from vine would ever be reaching out to them because they had gotten nothing but closed doors and silence before. So I had to go through all of these hoops and like I was, you know, trying to send people messages and then they would answer me. And so then I would Send them my LinkedIn link and my Twitter link and try to verify my identity with them and explained to them like, yes, I know no one has talked to you before, but here I am and we're going to turn over a new leaf.

[Benedict Townsend]

Karen was confident that Vine's long term survival depended on nurturing creators, especially the up and coming talent being crowded out by the mafia group. So her strategy behind the scenes was to split vine creators into three tiers, starting with those top dogs.

[Karen]

We called those guys in the room, the Viv's, the very important Viners. We called the second tier of Viners, the people in the mid range who made content that we all liked more, who were like people that were much easier to deal with and people who we thought were going to be the next wave of top creators. We called those the Ivy Leagues and then we called the very young Viners, people who were just starting out but were already gaining some traction. And we're like making jokes in smarter, more clever ways that we thought would probably be the generation after the Ivy Leaguers. We called those sprouts. So we had creator people at that point that were really doing well with the sprouts. And then I was working with the Ivy Leagues and then, you know, it was just the Viv's that we felt like we were never going to be able to turn our way. They were already too rich and too famous and too pissed off. So we knew that eventually they were going to retire or graduate to a different platform or something. But we just needed more time.

[Benedict Townsend]

It was a race against the clock. And Karen went a step further in her efforts to repair relations between Vine HQ and the Viners. She brought a creator of the on board to join her team.

[Chris Melburger]

The day I met her, she was like, you're Chris Fehlberger. And I was like, yeah. She goes, you're great. You should work for me. And I'm like, huh? Like, what do you mean?

[Benedict Townsend]

Chris Melburger. We met him last episode. He had nearly a million and a half followers. He was known for bizarre comedy skits and importantly, his connection to the 1600 Viners. These days, he's a twitch streamer. But back then, Karen described him as her mole in the community.

[Chris Melburger]

She was like, hey, how would you like to come work for me. And I was like, what do you mean? She goes at Twitter. I think a lot of people like you. I feel like, you know a lot of people, and we have a position that would be great for you, working with creators, helping them grow and helping them learn positive and good posting patterns and what not to post and kind of, like, helping them along on their journey. And I was like, that's kind of cool and very helpful and also, like, kind of wish I had that when.

[Rich Arnold]

I was starting out.

[Benedict Townsend]

Were you based in the vine office?

[Chris Melburger]

Yeah, it was in the Twitter headquarters, and vine had their own floor, so was that.

[Benedict Townsend]

That must have been weird for you to go from being a Vine creator to being, like, in the belly, the belly of the beast.

[Chris Melburger]

It was weird because I'd be walking around and, like, some of the engineers definitely, like, knew my stuff, which was funny. Yeah, it was kind of my job to, like, keep an eye on anyone who had, like, potential or was blowing up or doing well. We would eventually reach out, maybe, like, feature some of their stuff on certain channels to, you know, get new eyes on someone in a way that felt organic, but also had, like, a little bit of, like, a backing. It was people who wouldn't have really had a shot otherwise.

[Benedict Townsend]

And crucially, there were strategies to find new ways to promote creators who were previously being crowded out by revine.

[Chris Melburger]

For Revine, vine would have parties or meetups or events that people could show up and feel like they were important or recognized. People who had, like, a thousand followers, smaller people, so they felt like, oh, the app maybe does care. We would make channels for trends that were happening. Like, we made a whole playlist for a bunch of people who were, like, parodying and remaking it. And we would do one off things like that, where we would make a playlist for a few days or creator spotlights, where I would go in and find vines from, like, a creator's beginning to, like, current curate a playlist of, like, 40 of their best vines. And a lot of people would discover new creators that way.

[Benedict Townsend]

One of the creators who benefited from the new creator team's efforts was Kenny Knox. He was part of Karen's Ivy League tier.

[Kenny Knox]

I feel like my class of creators were really a dope class. I loved how they had a class of Viners every year, and then they would have a Vine panel and vine pushes them, and that was, like, a really great time. Karen and them, like, stepped their game up and made sure the next up and coming creators could get paid.

[Benedict Townsend]

So what kind of stuff was she doing in the vine days to sort of help you out.

[Kenny Knox]

She had like set up vine events. Like when we went to New York, we did a short film in Wisconsin. She flew all of us out to Wisconsin. We, we did a camping trip, we filmed a short film and they flew us to LA for Big Con. We went to Disney, they rented out Denny's and IHOP and that. We had free merch and our own panel. She gave us all community tabs, like Spotlight pages and we all got featured. And then when people download the vine app, our accounts will pop up on the suggested accounts. So we would get like a whole bunch of new followers whenever people downloaded vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

Just cuz of course the major sticking point was still monetization. Karen couldn't pay creators directly through vine, but she found ways around it.

[Kenny Knox]

We were making content essentially for free, literally for free. But vine was so much fun and the community was so dope. But see, Karen would pay us, not all of us. She would invite like groups of Viners to events and we get paid to be there. So she would find like loopholes and stuff to pay us. But like Twitter owned Vine, so it was only so much she could do.

[Benedict Townsend]

Oh, that's the, that's the first, I think we've heard of that. So she would pay some. Pay you to go to events? Yeah, that's quite smart.

[Kenny Knox]

I remember I never just fly to a different state. I'm going to New York. I ain't never been to New York. That was like. I was like, yo, and I get to stay at a five star hotel and I don't have to pay for anything. He said, I can get how much? I thought $100 was a lot back then. Like one of them events, she paid all of us like $6,000. I was just like, I am a kid, I just graduated high school, I would love to take that. I was like, yes. And then all my friends kept telling me to go to college, go to school, do this, do that. And I'm like, no, I'm riding this Wade until I can't ride it no more. I love Karen for life though. She showed nothing but loving me my whole career. Like my whole career. Even after vine, she made sure I had a manager. When I moved to la, she made sure I had like some work like Karen and Goat, like she don't owe me anything. Karen done a lot for me and I'm forever thankful and show hella gratitude to her. That's right.

[Benedict Townsend]

Brendan McNerney is another former Viner who's a big fan of Karen. He describes her as, quote, the fairy godmother of vine and says that her arrival signaled a clear moment of change in the app's relationship with his, its creators.

[Brendan McNerney]

It was a bad signal to creators that, like, they are now taken seriously. It's not just as a creator, an artist, or a performer, but as a career. And Karen made me want to become an ambassador for Vine. Karen made me proud of, oh, I'm a Vine creator, and, like, I now have a Google sheet that, you know, manages all my income, and I'm looking at my brand deals and I'm looking how much I'm investing in products, and I'm treating this like a business. And I have an platform, you know, that was acquired for 30 million by Twitter or whatever. And, you know, it's just like, oh, this is now a job. This is who I am. I like this identity, and I have somebody who's on my side and trying to take my career to the next level. I got that with Karen and never had that before.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's so refreshing to hear someone be positive at this point in the story. I feel like we've had so much doom and gloom, especially from creators getting whiplash here. Hearing someone say a Vine employee has made me happy. It feels like this strategy from Karen seems to be going well, at least from the creator's point of view. Right. Perhaps this could be a bit of an upswing for Vine.

[Mary Goodheart]

Yeah. You can't deny the difference in mood is massive. I've got to say, there's a thing niggling in my head, though.

[Benedict Townsend]

Oh, here we go.

[Mary Goodheart]

I mean, what we're talking about here, it sounds so positive. It sounds so good. But is this the vine that we love?

[Benedict Townsend]

Right.

[Mary Goodheart]

You know, if we think back to when we were first talking about the vine that Russ and the team launched, how chaotic and crazy it was. Russ's whole thing was, we're just going to make an amazing tool, and we're going to hand the tool over to the public and we're going to see what they do. And that's where we got all of the magic moments and the complete chaos and random subversive stuff. Karen's coming in, and obviously she has her background as a talent agent, and so she sees it differently, and she's seeing the creators as actually part of the product, and she wants to deliberately nurture and coax and, you know, that sounds so positive, but it's a completely different beast. Right.

[Benedict Townsend]

Certainly vine understood that this beast needed to evolve to keep up with the times. It's just that some of the ideas they had to do that seemed incredibly strange. Of course, it wasn't just Karen's new creator department that was making radical changes to try and turn the app's fortune around. Vines. Iconically stripped back interface, its revolutionary design choices, they'd been groundbreaking back in 2013 when it launched such a massive head start on mobile video. But in just two short years, it had become a very crowded space. And those features were no longer so original. In fact, they'd been replicated and often improved upon. By this point we had video on Instagram and on Facebook and an insurgent new app called Snapchat. It'll never last. And a whole new style of ultra quick posts called Stories. And on top of all of this, YouTube, the original online video giant, was courting creators like crazy. Dangling its healthy ad based monetization in front of them like a gold encrusted carrot.

[Unidentified Vine Staff]

I'm trying to think this was like 2016. Instagram had just completely started to like cleave off a huge amount of Vine's users. Instagram stories, I think had become a place for people to really share daily video from their lives. Instagram video in the feed was becoming a popular pace for creators to post video content. Same thing with YouTube and Facebook video. There were suddenly all these other options for mobile video. And so creators had a lot more leverage against the app. The app was struggling. They really needed these big content creators more than ever because engagement from users was falling. And this is right when the creators decide, okay, we want to get paid, like, we're not going to be on this app for free anymore. Because all of us could just hop to other apps and grow our audience just as quickly and potentially make money.

[Benedict Townsend]

Vine had to innovate or it was going to get left behind. And Rich Arnold was leading the major design overhauls. And the first, and it actually feels painful to say this was losing the 6 second limit.

[Rich Arnold]

It felt like you could only innovate so much within six seconds. Like you couldn't tell the stories I think some people wanted to tell. And then we also started to see stuff where we were effectively eliminating kinds of content that would have been nice to have on the platform. Like, I can't remember her name, it's gonna drive me crazy. But there was like this girl who used to post snippets of songs, a singer songwriter, and she would post six second sketches of songs she was writing. At some point, like one of them kind of blew up and then she posts another vine, which is like, hey, I did like the full version of the song, come find it on YouTube. Terrible for everyone. It sucks for us because, like, we're losing this content. It sucks for her because she's got to, like, maintain audiences in two places. And it sucks for all the people who are fans of her because I see it here and now. I need to, like, leave this, go to YouTube, go find her, go watch this weird sort of, like, bifurcated experience that is only happening because of this zigzag limit.

[Benedict Townsend]

The idea of extending the time limit was something that had already been discussed before. Creators were frequently complaining that their scope for innovation was limited by videos being so short. And perhaps more importantly for some, it also limited monetization opportunities. It's tricky to fit adverts into six seconds, but Rich says there was a deep suspicion at vine around the idea of making clips substantially longer.

[Rich Arnold]

I think we felt like, you can't have a. It sounds so stupid now, but it's like, oh, you can't have a two minute video and a feed is so long, your people are gonna be. They're not gonna go to the next video. And in reality, people are just like, when they're done, they just roll the next thing.

[Benedict Townsend]

Of course, eventually they did extend the core length of vines from 6 seconds to the incredibly obvious 140 seconds.

[Rich Arnold]

At the time, we decided to match what Twitter's max length was, which is like an asinine way to decide what the optimal video length is.

[Benedict Townsend]

Sorry, can we just drill down on the fact that they changed the iconic 6 seconds to 140 seconds purely because a tweet has 140 characters? 2.333. 3 minutes. Perfect.

[Mary Goodheart]

Oh, nailed it.

[Benedict Townsend]

The most bizarre, arbitrary decision in the history of decisions.

[Mary Goodheart]

I. I genuinely thought that us asking about how they landed on new length was going to lead to a sort of comically complex thing of like, oh, yeah, we had boardrooms full of people. We were. We had scientific studies, we had focus groups, we were experimenting. Like, I really thought that there would have been that much care put in it.

[Benedict Townsend]

We spent five weeks studying exactly what a second is.

[Mary Goodheart]

I mean, it's not like they didn't have resources for it. Yeah, but if you think of Russ and the team originally, when they were, like, making their baby from nothing, and the thought that they put into that six seconds, this team now, who have inherited this, have just gone, yeah, we've been won over by the arguments. It needs to be longer. How much longer should it be, Eh? We'll match Twitter.

[Benedict Townsend]

Another big change. Rich's design team was in the process of launching was a recommended feed.

[Rich Arnold]

I'm sure if you open your TikTok, it is meaningfully different than like your friend or your brother or whatever. And it's because you guys are into different things. You like different things, you know, you follow different people. Your recommended feed, it allows for micro communities to really flourish. We had micro communities on vine, but they were like much more insular, much more like, difficult to get into, like to discover.

[Benedict Townsend]

So how is this different from the popular page?

[Rich Arnold]

If you went to the Hot now page and I went to the Hot now page, we'd see the exact same feed. So it creates this monoculture of expression and yeah, so I think like if we had actually embraced a recommended feed earlier and actually done recommendation, well, it would have been interesting to see what it would have done to the content that was being created. But I think we were, myself included, actually, I think this is one of my mistakes. I think we were too precious about giving people autonomy with regard to what their own feed is. Because even like we kept a chronological feed for almost the entire time too. Like, even that is like asinine.

[Benedict Townsend]

Despite the many complaints you'll see online about heavily curated feeds these days, the fact is that a well seasoned algorithm will always deliver a better user experience than just a raw conveyor belt of content. Hell, TikTok achieved rapid cultural dominance almost entirely thanks to its revolutionary algorithm that can learn users, likes and interests in record time. You have to give people what they want, but also remember that people don't really know what they want, not until you bring it to them. And Rich says there was actually a fairly positive response to the design changes they were making. But within the bigger machine that was Twitter team, Vine felt like a side act. When was the first moment that you got a sense that things were maybe on a bit of a downswing?

[Rich Arnold]

I remember like at some point the company did like a code Red because views were declining, which is not uncommon in these larger tech companies. And some metric that you're worried about is declining. And so you spin up this project where there's some urgency behind it and people are pulled off of other projects to put everything behind this. And we had this code Red about the views declining and I don't think they actually stemmed the decline. And when they wound it down, I was like, I think that's my first realization, like, oh, this might be a problem. We're, we just threw everything into this and it's not. And we're winding down this like Code Red. But we haven't actually, like, fixed the issue. You know, we were technically working for Twitter. We were a team within Twitter, but we were, like, pretty disconnected from them in terms of, like, how we work together, but also just, like, geographically, because most of Twitter at the time was still in California. And I remember maybe like a year into working there, I saw Twitter. The Twitter design team posted a photo of everyone hanging out internally, and I just, like, saw how many people were there, and I was like, oh, holy shit, what are they all working on? You know?

[Mary Goodheart]

So.

[Benedict Townsend]

So how big was this vine team at the time you joined on that top floor?

[Karen]

I'm going to say 60 people, comparatively. You know, when we would travel literally around the globe to different Twitter offices, we saw the entirety of the Twitter staff, which was in the thousands. And compared to that, we didn't feel very big at all. The vine offices when I joined were on the top floor of the New York Twitter offices. You know, we just had desks, no walls, so we could see everybody in one glance. And when I interviewed for the company, as someone who had been working externally at an influencer agency, I just thought, like, wow, okay, so vine is in the Twitter office. And then Niche, which was the Twitter owned and acquired influencer agency, was also in that office. And I just thought the powerhouse of this trio of companies, like, wow, we can really dominate when we all work together. And it became really obvious as soon as I joined that vine was essentially the redheaded stepchild of Twitter. And very few people who worked at Twitter, used Vine, understood vine, were fluent in Vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

In the course of researching this story, one theme keeps surfacing. Various people told us about a tense, uneasy dynamic that existed between Twitter and Vine. It's an odd one, because Twitter spotted Vine's star power early, investing big, betting hard on its success. The partnership had all the shine of a red carpet romance, dazzling from the outside. But despite the fanfare behind the scenes, the chemistry just wasn't there. When did you first become aware that there was this sort of odd relationship between Twitter and Vine?

[Rich Arnold]

It feels like it might have been, like, a bit of a slow realization. I think actually, maybe the first time it really dawned on me was when Twitter released their own, like, video client. Fast forward a year later, and Twitter acquires Periscope. The people in Periscope had much more influence on Twitter as a product and probably much more longevity by virtue of, like, taking advantage of the fact that they were attached to Twitter.

[Benedict Townsend]

Periscope, which you'll be forgiven for forgetting, was a live video streaming app. When Vines started falling out of favor. It became Twitter's new golden child. You know, it's a shame because there was a brief, wonderful period where you could post Vines on Twitter and they would play natively in the feedback. Vines would be interspersed with tweets in your timeline in a slick way that was honestly very ahead of its time and much more reminiscent of the state of social media these days. It almost made too much sense, Twitter integrating one very popular product with another so that everyone could enjoy mummy and daddy playing nice with each other. Anyway, very quickly, Twitter changed the rules. So Vines would only post to Twitter as links and would only play when you left the app. It's yet another inflection point. If Twitter had kept vine properly integrated, would vine not have lived a little longer, found it easier to maintain cultural relevance? Do you think it's almost a case of vine not taking advantage of its relationship with Twitter rather than Twitter spurning Vine? Or do you think it was a sort of mutually frosty relationship on the vine side?

[Rich Arnold]

I felt like there was probably this desire to be like, listen, we're going to do our own thing. Like, we get this more than you do. Which is probably true. I mean, to some degree, like, I'm sure Russ and them knew vine better than people at Twitter. But that said, there's, like, a way to do that. You can even sign up with a Twitter account. I think for some time, I think it was, like, not till very, very late in the game that we even allowed that.

[Benedict Townsend]

According to Karen, this tense dynamic had roots all the way back to day one.

[Karen]

The stories that were passed down to me were that before vine, every social media platform was trying to buy Instagram.

[Mary Goodheart]

And.

[Karen]

And the founders of Instagram had a very specific request in that they not be integrated fully into whatever company bought them. They wanted to operate ext and independently, and the founders wanted to still be sort of the final word of leadership decisions. And what I have been told is that Twitter decided to tell them that that was not going to be possible if they joined Twitter. And so that's what made Instagram go with Facebook, because Facebook allowed them that freedom. So then Twitter felt so burned by that acquisition that when vine came along, the founders also asked for the same autonomy, and Twitter granted it to them. And I think there was just a real tension from the fact that the founders had come in kind of saying, like, we want your money, but we don't want to be on your team. And because the founders had that philosophy, it trickled down. And, you know, whether or not the Employees at Vine felt the same way. There was just this quite large and difficult tension. The political landscape was hard to navigate. And anytime we, like, went and had a meeting with people at Twitter and asked them, how can we better integrate, we were told, you need to play for the front of the jersey, meaning you ultimately work for Twitter. So stop thinking about what's best for vine, which, of course, is, like, impossible to do when you're working on this separate product and you have all these ideas and you want to, like, lean into the strengths of Twitter and be stronger together. But that was just not a possibility.

[Benedict Townsend]

I actually asked Russ about the deal they made back in 2012.

[Russ]

We weren't really pushing to sell the company in the near term, especially not before launching the thing. Yeah, we were in our 20s. It was an opportunity that was just too good to pass up. Twitter leadership at the time, under Dick Costello, they were very clear, like, hey, you guys clearly know what you're doing. We'll let you continue working on your own roadmap. We'll let you stay in your offices in New York. You won't have to rebrand the app, won't have to put a Twitter logo on it, and we'll just. We'll acquire you, and you can keep. Keep doing it and launch it how you want. Our initial desire to work with Twitter was just around how do we make this better for Twitter users? And that conversation evolved into one of like, okay, like, we can help integrate vine into Twitter. But to share a Vine video on Twitter, you had to post a link, and that link then would appear in feeds, and users be able to click on the link and see the video in a separate web browser. And we thought that was a subpar experience. So we envisioned the vine video playing directly in a tweet. The tweet was like a kernel or a vessel for all types of media.

[Benedict Townsend]

Were you surprised that they allowed you to sort of just do your own thing and not be messed with?

[Russ]

You know, we asked for what we wanted. We didn't expect Twitter really to push back on that. We knew eventually there'd be some more integration between the teams. It ended up being a lot more contentious than we had hoped, but initially, it was great.

[Benedict Townsend]

Do you think in hindsight, maybe if vine had been more directly integrated from the beginning, things might have gone smoothly in the long run?

[Rich Arnold]

No.

[Benedict Townsend]

Why not?

[Russ]

The two teams were operating on different mandates and sets of goals, but I think ultimately the user numbers are what mattered most, and that was just like a product problem.

[Rich Arnold]

I think we had to Reach that stage of the life cycle of a social media product where, like, people are showing up less, so people are posting less, so people are showing up less, so people post less.

[Mary Goodheart]

The way that Rich is talking about it, it makes it sound like this kind of death spiral was inevitable. But that's not what happened for other platforms, for Instagram, for Facebook. So clearly some platforms can avoid it. Had vine just genuinely become not the best platform for video at this point?

[Benedict Townsend]

Well, that's the weird thing. You might think, oh, everyone's jumping ship to Instagram. It must be so much better. They must have cracked the code, but they hadn't. Instagram video was clunky. It was limited. To be honest, it kind of still is. Plus, like vine at that time, there wasn't really any proper monetization.

[Mary Goodheart]

So why were people going there?

[Benedict Townsend]

Well, there's a couple of reasons. I mean, the first one is just, I think, plain frustration. Like vine wasn't evolving, it wasn't iterating. In our present day, you look at TikTok, TikTok's got a new feature every 15 minutes. TikTok is always evolving. Vine was always the same. And when nothing changes, you know, people just get bored. They just look elsewhere. And then the second reason, I think, is just simplicity. The average user doesn't want multiple apps. If you say to them, hey, you can have one app that kind of just does everything, you know, in your busy day, that's quite a nice promise to users. And that's what Instagram was really trying to do. They were like, why leave Instagram and go and watch video elsewhere? You can just do it all in Instagram.

[Mary Goodheart]

But this is so disheartening, because I. I swear, just a minute ago, we were talking about how simplicity was the absolute magic that made vine so special.

[Benedict Townsend]

Absolutely. But when you are a giant platform like Instagram, you can, shall we say, lovingly take some of that simplicity and that originality from someone else and make it your own. I mean, people forget now, but Stories was a signature Snapchat feature. That was Snapchat's thing, was that you could post a story. Instagram nicked that. And now we basically only associate stories with Instagram. Now, that doesn't kill Snapchat, because often the borrowed thing is not quite as good as the original, but you're going to siphon off enough users that it's meaningful to do that.

[Mary Goodheart]

You're at least going to have to fight.

[Benedict Townsend]

You're at least going to have to fight.

[Brendan McNerney]

I remember there was an inflection point where engagement just dropped so bad on the app and people stopped growing. And I think towards that inflection point, everybody thought it's either going to get really bad or really good. And if it's really good, I want to grow. If it's really bad, I want to squeeze all the juice and all the followers I can out of this so that I can move them elsewhere and not have this be a wasted four or five years of my life. So I think people are sticking around for a fork in the road, regardless of which direction it took.

[Benedict Townsend]

Across the office on the creative development team, Chris Melburger had his ear to the ground and the message he was getting was the same.

[Chris Melburger]

Not even internally, but even, like word of mouth people, oh, you still use Vine. Oh, you're on Vine. You could tell with Instagram video coming out and then Snapchat being a thing and people going to YouTube. And it felt very much like the same few people would just be on the popular page every day.

[Rich Arnold]

And it was like.

[Chris Melburger]

It didn't feel like there was a lot of, like, stuff going on. It was very much just like the same old, same old. So you could kind of feel like the life draining slowly from it.

[Benedict Townsend]

Karen was still convinced that if content creators were nurtured and the kind of content people actually wanted to see was prioritized, that she could turn things around and it would be a new era of vine, both faithful to its original legacy, while also having the courage to stay relevant. Perhaps even revolutionary. It would be an approach that embraced creators instead of shunning them, and emphasized vine first and foremost as a creative tool, as a way to get leverage over Instagram and Snapchat, which were much more focused on being social sites. It was much more about your friends, your family. Vine was all in on content creation. And in that sense, you can't help but think of TikTok, which very much took up that baton a few short years later. To this day, I wouldn't really say that TikTok is a social media site or all that it really pretends to be. It's first and foremost a place for creation and creators. That's what vine needed to be if it had any hope of surviving. Everything was riding on the rescue plan.

[Karen]

So I took a page from my celebrity days because I remembered when I worked for Ashton and he was married to Demi Moore at the time. Demi would always get these invites to come to this, like, luncheon event where she was being given an award, right? And I realized this is actually just a scheme. You, as a Top celebrity are probably not going to go to an award show unless you're being given an award. So like, how do you make sure you get at least one celebrity to an event? You come up with some award to give them, right? So I reached out to King Batch's people and said, like, listen, he's never been acknowledged by vine before. Like vine had never even congratulated him. So I said, I'm new, we're turning over a new leaf. What I want to do is throw a huge party to celebrate King Badge and I'm going to throw it on behalf of Vine. It's a celebration for his success and also I would love for him to run the guest list. So I thought this is a great way to get everybody in one place. I'll turn the whole control of the event over to King Bach, have him invite everybody because nobody was responding to me. We all worked together and we had the first ever vine hosted party for Viners.

[Benedict Townsend]

The party, an act of defiant positivity, A glittering Hollywood soiree, an olive branch disguised as champagne and canapes. Glasses of fizz, A hubbub of excited chatter. All the buzzing excitement of an LA industry party. The very same kind of industry intrigue that creators had been dying for.

[Chris Melburger]

Open bar, really cool spot in California along the beach. Definitely expensive to rent out.

[Benedict Townsend]

Chris working for Karen at the time, new trouble was brewing. But he remembers the rare magic of the event.

[Chris Melburger]

It was like the first time some of the biggest Viners and some of the smallest ones and everyone in between were all in one area together mingling and just talking to everyone. Like you, Big Nick, you had, you know, Ariel Vandenberg, you had Courtney Miller, you had Matt Cutchell, Brandon Calvia, like Jason Nash. All these different people in one area. It was like the first time where it felt like we were all kind of in this moment together where I was like, hey, we all do this regardless of like, if we ever made fun of each other or whatever. Like, we all, we're all here right now. And it was cool. It was actually a really fun time, like, good camaraderie and it was, it was a very cool moment. But you could definitely tell there was some sort of hesitation because like, it did feel very much like we need to show love to these Viners even though they hate us.

[Karen]

An amazing night. It was so great to see people who had been friends on the Internet, in private messages only, all of a sudden meet for the first time in person. It was really like beautiful and heartwarming and the whole party in general was this. And we were, you know, kind of sharing as a content team. We are the new people and it's going to be a friendlier place for you. Now.

[Benedict Townsend]

Symbolically, King Bach's party was a celebratory moment heralding a new era of harmony between vine and its creators. A white flag, a treaty signed, a change of guard, the bugle call of a new dispensation.

[Karen]

But at the end of the night, Marcus Johns came over to me and said, hey, everybody from 1600 vine would like to meet with you.

[Benedict Townsend]

There it is.

[Mary Goodheart]

There it is.

[Benedict Townsend]

Oh, boy. This is what we've been building to. The ominous invitation is to a meeting that'll take place just off Hollywood Boulevard at 1600 vine, the heart of the influencer kingdom.

[Karen]

And so we were in this apartment conference room, and it was like Jake, Paul and Marcus Johns and, you know, every kind of top Viner at the time.

[Benedict Townsend]

Next, a meeting and a million dollar demand.

[Karen]

There was some talk about how they all knew that if they ganged up and all decided to stop posting on vine, like immediately, that the whole app would cease to exist.

[Benedict Townsend]

Could Vine's birthplace also become its burial ground? Would the very creators who built it be the ones to end it?

[Karen]

And then the tone changed and it started to get kind of aggressive and.

[Benedict Townsend]

Ugly in the room and bruised and battered. The little app that could was on its last legs. But blow after blow, it was still staggering forward. And against all odds, there were still those fighting for its survival. It wasn't over. Not yet. Stick around, because the real twist is still to come. You can listen to the last two episodes of vine six Seconds that Changed the world when they drop next Wednesday, May 7th. You can listen to Vine 6 seconds that changed the World on Global Player, download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com vine 6 seconds that changed the World is a Global original podcast created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend and produced by my co creator Mary Goodheart. Narrative and creative by producer Kevia Cardoso. Score and sound design by Patrick Lee and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual Podcasts and Vicki Etchels is director of podcasts at Global this is a Global Player original podcast.