Vine is dead, again. On Friday, Dan Hoffman, a co-founder of the defunct six-second video app, announced via Twitter that v2, his Vine sequel, is now indefinitely on hold. Hoffman said his vision of a small passion project was engulfed by too much attention, and that he would need a larger team and potential investors (?!) to see it through properly.
He tweeted a rather lengthy note going into detail on “the very difficult decision of postponing the v2 project for an indefinite amount of time.”
This news could be seen as a bummer for those wishing for Vine to make a return. Except realistically, 2018 hasn’t appeared any more friendly to this type of ecosystem than 2016 did, when Vine shut down.
YouTube, which engulfed many Vine stars, is experiencing extreme backlash from former Vine stars like Logan Paul and seeing creators complaining about not being able to financially support themselves on the platform—a problem that Vine stars rather famously addressed when the biggest creators there demanded money and support from the platform and then bailed once it was clear Vine wouldn’t listen to their demands.
Few details ever emerged about v2 beyond some basic information on how it might work. It was supposed to include a newsfeed and ability to post video clips. In other words, it was Vine, but with a different name, and without any guarantee that exciting creators of original content would return. When TechCrunch specifically asked in January how the app would be monetized, Hoffman stated: “Right now we’re in information gathering mode, and part of that means talking to people. On the forums, on Twitter, on calls, and in person.”
Well, Hoffman will now have a lot more time to answer that all-important question of how creators will sustain themselves on this hypothetical platform. If people are still craving meme content, why not try Twitter or simply just type “Vine” into YouTube and get lost in endless compilation videos? The platform may once again seem dead, but the memes will remain.