If you picture social video as a colorful ecosystem full of
emoji and chat bubbles, you really should try to think of it more as a jungle —
a place where the strong eat the weak.

Periscope ate Meerkat.
Instagram’s new video features might be chewing on Snapchat. And Facebook Live
is trying to gobble up everything in sight.

The
latest casualty is
Vine, a six-second video app owned by Twitter. The app spawned some stars,
among them the singer Shawn
Mendes, and improved upon the best thing about Twitter — funny tweets — by
adding audio and visual snippets. Some of it was total nonsense, and that’s why
it was so great.

But with Twitter struggling
to become profitable — and after the news that
the company would cut about 350 jobs, or 9 percent of its work force — Vine said
in a Medium post on Thursday that it would close down in the coming
months.

One theory: Instagram ate it.

Here’s what Mike Isaac, a tech reporter for The New York
Times, said in an interview on Thursday about Vine: “I was told many times by
people inside of Twitter that Vine never recovered from Instagram’s video
launch a few years back. That threat of stealing users and market share was
real, and it worked.”

In May, the media website
Digiday reported that many of Vine’s biggest stars had jumped ship,
leaving for more profitable pastures, like YouTube and Facebook.

“Facebook and YouTube have much larger scale than Vine, so
you can reach more people and make the most money there,” Esa Fung, a popular
Vine user, told Digiday.

Another theory from our tech reporter: Vine was dead weight.

“If you have an entire division of your company that doesn’t
make money and is a real resource drain, that’s hard to justify keeping it up
and running,” Mr. Isaac said.

I can’t tell you; I’ll have to show you. Just know this:
Vines turned nonsense into short bursts of hilarious art.

Vine also had real utility for sports fans, who used it to
replay memorable moments from the arena and the field over and over again.
Vines captured by basketball fans are
particularly popular, but memorable
memes in all sports were hatched.

On Thursday, DeRay Mckesson, a civil rights activist, was
one of several people who pointed out that Vine gave protesters in Ferguson,
Mo., a way to broadcast what was happening in the months following
the shooting deathof Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager,
by a white police officer.

The footage captured moments of heightened tension between
protesters and the police.

“I’ll always love Vine because that was all we really had in
protest in the Fall 2014,” Mr. Mckesson tweeted. “There
was no Twitter video and no Periscope back then.”

Tracy Clayton, who hosts the “Another Round” podcast at
BuzzFeed, wrote in a series of tweets that Vine had given young minority
performers a platform to express themselves and a way to grow a following
outside the confines of conventional media.

“People love black culture, but they don’t like to pay black
people for it. (Hi, appropriation). Vine wasn’t perfect, but it was a way to
try and get around it,” Ms. Clayton wrote on
Twitter.

Vine said that it would figure out ways for users to keep
and store their favorite pieces of six-second art.

“We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the
right way,” the company wrote on Medium. “You’ll be able to access and download
your Vines.”

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