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Out of curiosity is there a FOSS (add-free) short form video type social media?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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IIRC Vine and Coub made it mainstream more than 12 years ago, it's not something new. Gifs are basically a prequel of the format.
If people wouldn't like it, it wouldn't survive this long, and wouldn't be copied by every other company and requested in threads like this. It's alright if you don't like them but please let other people have fun. You don't have to "learn" from everything, it's just jokes and light entertainment.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.
I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the "privilege") despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:
I think the reason is because its easier to consume when you only have 2 minutes in a queue. Not enough time to read something
And for people who don't read
Yeah why did vine fail but tiktok take off? I never understood that
Source
Twitter was financially in a bad shape for a long time, the first year they generated some profit was 2018. Source Vine existed 2012-2017, I think they couldn't figure out how to monetize it. Twitter was a text based platform, tiktok was designed for video from conception.
But I still don't know why they didn't try to sell it instead of shutting it down.
Coub was also nearly shut down in 2022, it seems like it's hard to profitably maintain a short video service.
One more thing could have an important impact was music rights. Tiktok has special deals with record labels for background music, Coub was Russian, so they could just pirate music. Streaming wasn't big back than, only spotify existed, labels couldn't figure yet out how to milk internet users, so I guess Vine couldn't get as good deals as it would now. Too early, too legal.
TikTok's algorithm. It does a lot of things against modern morals but people inherently like them. It is not inclusive and pro-erotic. And ease of use too. Plus state funded money.
So twitter needed a thot detector that calculated skin exposed percent, and put that into everyone's feed? Then vine woulda taken off, you reckon?