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I grew up on MySpace as a late teenager. Having your favorite friends or new friends to follow and to choose from. I chose my favorite song as my profile background, with a cute background that I changed very often. Having my friends look at my profile and enjoy my new looks for the day or week and laugh about what I posted. I met new people all the time, even began a relationship with a cute boo from New Orleans that moved before Katrina. That was my first taste of social media, and I felt that life is called online and social media. I met true friends that I still have to this day. As I got older, it truly shifted.

It was called “Vine”, but I call it “Da Vine”. Da Vine did come about in the early 2000’s, and baby, that was my jam to my peanut butter. It was different, but I truly enjoyed it because it had more than MySpace. With Vine, you had the choice to scroll up to look at the video. You can make recordings and loop other pictures versus one picture at a time. Now, here comes YouTube; you can truly record online and do videos. This was crazy to me. It’s cute videos and story time, plus people sharing their day-to-day routine. Now grant it you could not do fancy or long-term videos, but it caught people’s attention. Back to Da Vine, once you had my attention, I just had to hold the button to loop it around to keep watching. It kept me engaged, wanting more. Then it goes into comedy, home, animals, music, and more. Now with Da Vine, the person could REVINE to hype up the people to boost the videos and love them, and boost it up with views, also move up their rank because of the views. Doesn’t this seem similar to TikTok? The more views and likes you have as an influencer or a personality for a product or service.

Now, this is the gag we do, as people watching our favorite videos from other people; here comes the word algorithmic. I never thought of that word until a couple of years ago. I asked my niece why this stuff is, but another word for this paper keeps popping up on my page. She said, ” Because you are looking at the same or simpler thing”. It’s called an algorithm, and companies and other AI use it to hook you. I was shocked, like, oh my, I am old now… Now, from what I was told, Twitter killed it. I tried it, but it was too hard for me, and I just could not get into it at all. Bye Felicia.  However, Facebook came out before Twitter, and I was down for that. I could work it; it was easier, more my speed.

After Covid, that container became TikTok was the thang. Suddenly everyone was home, on their phone, and it became the main thing to stay connected to the world. It was the main stage for you to make videos, explore, and not know it would change their lives. Now we know TikTok was not the inventor it was Da Vine with the tools and the real thing with the tools. It had auto-loops and the viewers to make it. What got taken away when Vine disappeared was the pure constraints. The platform felt smaller, less optimized for the endless engagement.

Post-COVID, TikTok took short video habits of Da Vine, the reels, and the behaviors of algorithmic feeds began to pop up. Threads are coming in strong, looping in the memes; the camera is staged for the people to make a video, and it is show time. TikTok just added the industrial algorithm of the culture and the isolation that we made of people to want more.

I still miss the old MySpace feeling of me owning my interaction with others and the  Da Vine feeling of making something so little matter to me. TikTok is better, no doubt, and I do love the videos, and I am addicted. It feels less like a place and more like a machine that knows me well. Da Vine did show how the future can be technically better, and the scroll up or down still got it.