Vine relaunches as Byte to eat into TikTok’s user base

Weblog: winning users back from Chinese-owned app will be no mean feat

Watch out TikTok because Vine is back. Sort of. The creators behind short-form video-sharing platform Vine have relaunched in the form of Byte. Six-second looping video is here again but with a brand-new app that aims to recapture a user base that seems to have mostly migrated to TikTok.

Winning users back will be no mean feat as the Chinese-owned app was the second most popular in 2019, with more than 1.5 billion downloads across iOS and Android.

The redesign does look promising. Videos are categorised in genres including comedy, animation, pets, art, gaming, beauty and music. They might want to add bathroom as this is where most of Gen Z seem to film their viral videos (better acoustics and lighting and a large mirror obvs).

One issue already affecting the new platform is comment spam, but founder Dom Hoffman has tweeted that this is being fixed soon.

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“It should be noticeably better than it was 24 hours ago and should continue to improve over the next little while.

“In the medium term, we’ll be making more dramatic changes to comments including a) the ability to like comments, and b) the abilities to block/filter/limit commenting,” he added.