TikTok vs Vine

TikTok vs. Vine

Is the original always the best? Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’ll be pitting TikTok against Vine.

For this showdown, we’re going to be looking at which of these platforms is superior. We’ll be going through a range of different categories to find out whether TikTok is really the new Vine, or if it isn’t worth a download.

Round 1: Personalities

With Team 10 gone, it was only a matter of time before something took their place, and that something is the Hype House. This LA mansion is frequented by around twenty of the most followed TikTok stars, most prominently Charli and Dixie D’Amelio and Lil Huddy. Not every Hype House member physically lives there, but a lot of them do and they’re frequently seen boosting their likes by collaborating with each other. The Hype House is the brainchild of Thomas Petrou, who was also an important member of Team 10 before its demise. But many of these stars are far from household names, and you’d be forgiven for not knowing who most of them are.

In its prime, Vine had a Hype House of its own, 1600 Vine in Hollywood, which was once home to Logan Paul, one of the app’s biggest stars. But Logan is just one of many big Viners who have continued to make popular content long after the platform’s downfall. While he and his brother Jake have been flirting with controversy in the years since, others have become big names in the commentary community on YouTube after the Vine invasion. Cody Ko was one of the most successful creators who made this move, while musician Shawn Mendes has had plenty of success releasing albums and touring the world.

TikTok is a little too new for us to see where its biggest names will be in five years’ time, while Vine has already proven that its famous faces are versatile and aren’t going anywhere.

Round 2: Features

One of the biggest advantages TikTok has over all video sharing platforms is just how many in-app editing features there are. There’s no more having to edit videos in third-party applications before they’re ready to upload, because it’s all there, providing creators with way more tools than Vine ever did. These features have been so good for TikTok that Instagram has started to copy it, and some outlets even recommend editing Instagram story videos in TikTok beforehand. On top of that, TikTok has proved lucrative - at least for its owners - thanks to the ads it runs, and there are plans to implement monetization for creators in much the same way YouTube does.

There were a few reasons behind the death of Vine, but one of the biggest was its lack of monetization. While it did get ads eventually, it was always a struggle for creators to make any money at all, and talks with Twitter to organize a paycheck for the platform’s biggest creators didn’t go to plan. Ultimately, Twitter couldn’t turn a profit on its investment, so Vine had to go. Vine was also much more limited; it didn’t boast a robust editing suite like TikTok has, with creators often having to rely on just music and clever cuts to make their clips work.

TikTok is a lucrative platform with lots of cool features for its growing user base to implement, and Vine can’t hold a candle to it in this regard.

Round 3: Comedy

With over 500 million users, there are plenty of hilarious TikToks to scroll through. And if you don’t want to search for them, there are already compilations all over the internet of the very best TikTok has to offer. But with so many users, it also generates a lot of duds and copycats, best shown through the frequent “challenges” users take part in. While these are fun and viral, it’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd when they’re so uniform and rigid. Plus, since TikTok originated from Musical.ly, it’s still home to content you’re more likely to cringe at than laugh at.

Because anyone could upload a six-second video, Vine had the same potential for duds that TikTok does now, and there were certainly plenty of bad Vines. But the ones that were good have had life spans beyond their creators and beyond the app itself. YouTube is drowning in Vine compilations trying to capture just what it was that made Vine so great, and it’s no coincidence that all the funniest TikToks are similar to the content we saw on Vine. And ex-Viners are still producing lots of hilarious clips and videos for YouTube, Instagram, and, yes, even TikTok.

The best TikToks come to be by their creators emulating what Vine used to do, and while they’re still great entertainment, they wouldn’t exist without it.

Round 4: Creativity

There may be lots of features on TikTok, but if you don’t know how to use them to the betterment of your video then it’ll be hard to gain popularity. The best users are the ones who are the most creative, who make use of all the editing tricks TikTok offers and know when to use them sparingly. TikToks are longer than Vines (up to 15 seconds for one clip) which you can chain for up to 60 seconds of footage, which greatly opens up options for creators. On top of that, TikTok retains Musical.ly’s duet feature, meaning that people can react to other TikToks within the app itself, taking advantage of the popularity of reaction and commentary content online.

When Vine first launched, its 6-second time limit seemed like it might be a bad move. But this constraint forced its users to be as creative as possible with what they could share – and the results were amazing. It was certainly frustrating to try and cram a joke into just six seconds, however, and it does mean that popular Viners had to change what they were doing to survive. None of the biggest Vine stars make incredibly short videos as their main source of recognition nowadays, instead favoring sketch comedy, commentary, vlogs, and so on.

Vine’s tight format and strict rules changed social media; while YouTube was trying to increase watch time, Vine changed the game. But TikTok is just as versatile and has even more options for creators, and provides a home for the short-form content we’ve been missing. This one’s a draw.

Round 5: Iconic

TikTok is home to many trends and challenges that have permeated other parts of the internet, whether that’s by videos being reposted or shared to different platforms or by its particularly persistent advertising campaign. A few of these have definitely taken on lives of their own, but some of its most popular trends are also some of its cringiest. Listening to “why do good girls like bad guys” over and over again gets old fast, after all. If TikTok shut down next week, how many of its biggest hits would live forever elsewhere?

YouTube is awash with Vine compilations, many featuring the same sets of iconic clips over and over that still generate revenue for their authors years later. In fact, reposted Vines on YouTube are so popular that ex-Viners can get more money from the ad revenue on these than they ever could on Vine, opening up the small platform to billions more viewers. Vines are a network of inside jokes representing an entire generation, all of whom were lamenting the platform’s demise long before it shut its doors for good.

The simple fact is that TikTok just isn’t old enough to have become anywhere near as iconic as Vine was, while our favorite Vines live on forever.

WINNER: TikTok 2 / Vine 4

TikTok will always be in Vine’s shadow, and while today it might be a great place to get your fix of funny, short videos, we’ll never forget what started it all. This winner of this round and this versus is Vine!