Twitter issued an announcement  that they will be discontinuing the mobile app Vine under the Twitter owned publishing platform, Medium, at 10:30 a.m. on Oct 27. Vine had been issuing large updates to the service up until Oct 12.

“I feel like that’s a crazy stupid move on Twitter’s part, because Vine’s such a huge sensation, it makes no sense,” Caspian Woodward said.

In June 2012, Vine founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll created a new social and creative platform by taking the video trend, putting it in a box and looping it for six seconds. This take on video was later adopted by Instagram. Vine was purchased by Twitter in October 2012 for $33 million. Throughout its lifetime, Vine gave rise to a new series of entertainers, called “vine stars” by the community, while also bringing in over 200 million monthly users.

“Vine was actually one of the few social media apps I thoroughly enjoyed. At first, I saw Vine as an app for people to make just weird skits but then I came across a bunch of music/art vines. Then, I decided to make my own which was also a whole lot of fun. They were simple edits but I was proud of them,” Samuel Gonzales said.

Although they have gone through the past nine quarters with slowing revenue growth, Twitter also laid off 9 percent of their workforce, which equates to around 350 workers. Twitter also reported on Medium that they will not be closing the system immediately but instead will leave existing Vines on the website while phasing out the application over the coming months.  

Since the news came out, Vine has been the most trending topic on twitter, with 4.61 million tweets and currently has 17K posts under the topic on facebook. In May of this year, NY Mag reported that “Vine Is Dying and Going to Facebook Heaven,” with many similar headlines in the following months from The Atlantic and Wall Street Journal. Many have been predicting that Vine would eventually be outdone by Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, who have been in constant competition over the video format. Others have theorized that Twitter is making room for a possible acquisition of music streaming and publishing service, Soundcloud, in which they invested $70 million in earlier this year.

by CONNOR O’BRIEN