When a TikTok has Vine energy

Versus a one-minute TikTok that's three hours long.

Frances is on Instagram now. Source: Vine

vine en·er·gy /vayn ɛnərǰi/
Noun

Adam Perkin’s death last week sent me down a Vine rabbit hole. I wasn’t a huge user of the app the way I currently am with TikTok, but the video compilations on YouTube mean I can still readily quote the classics. They have titles like “vines that toast my buns” and “vines that cared for me when no one else did,” and the rise of TikTok has allowed for spin-off compilations like “tik toks that taste like vines” and “tik toks that are vines at heart.” These TikTok videos have, according to many of their comments, “Vine energy.” 

Like TikTok, Vine was a short-form, looping video app—so why is a TikTok with Vine energy, like this one, such a rare find? 

After an embarrassing amount of “research,” I can confidently say that TikTok’s arrival synced perfectly with our shrinking attention span, whereas Vine was a little too early. By now, we’ve figured out how to tell a story or share a message that feels complete in a matter of seconds—TikToks that use their full allotted minute often get comments like “this was three hours long.” But during Vine times, we were still clumsily adapting to making such brief content, which is why Vines tended to feel like they were cut short. 

Almost all iconic Vines give you whiplash, cutting off just as you’re starting to get your bearings. Those who succeeded on the app, like Perkins, used this to their advantage—the lack of context for a line like “welcome to Chili’s” was the joke. 

This is maybe why few Vine creators have found similar followings on TikTok. Perkins and others like Elisabeth Jakovenko were and continued to be mostly successful making cameos on the app rather than as consistent creators. Jakovenko’s most popular videos tend to be her recreations of her past popular Vines, allowing people to get nostalgic in the comments. 

Nostalgia is a key element of Vine energy—not even for Vine itself, but for a different era of the internet when things were less polished, when we didn’t quite know what we were doing. If a TikTok video feels like the record button was pressed just a tad too late or that it ends a few seconds too early, it has Vine energy. It’s not content made for the internet, but a real life moment the internet happened to glimpse. —Kate Lindsay