You Might Be Able To Still Find Your Favorite Vine Videos, Here's How
TikTok has become a broad favorite of younger smartphone users looking for a video sharing platform with rudimentary editing features that can still make compelling content. Of course, TikTok didn't introduce that concept, even if the closest predecessor didn't have the exact same functionality. In many ways, TikTok was preceded by Vine, a short form video sharing site that was acquired by Twitter before its January 2013 launch and integrated into the micro blogging app. While simple yet creative editing flourished just as it does on TikTok today, there was one very big difference — most videos were capped at six seconds.
That six second (later 10 second) cut off point limited Vine's adoption by creators whose content failed to fit into those constraints. That said, it certainly paid off for some early Vine stars, including eventual social media and crossover superstars Logan and Jake Paul. However, once Twitter added native video support in 2015, Vine wasn't long for this world. Vine was totally shut down in January 2017, and though a browsable archive was kept alive at first, that was killed off in 2019.
Still, for some of Vine's biggest creators — including current major celebrities like the Pauls — there is still a demand to see old Vine content. Thankfully, a lot of it is still available, so let's take a look at the different ways that you can access it.
Many old Vines are still live at their original URLs
Somewhat surprisingly for a social media service that officially ended the better part of a decade ago and with a front page that doesn't direct you to any content — and hasn't since 2019 — X has still maintained a full archive of everything that was still on Vine when the service was discontinued in 2017. The main page of the site doesn't direct you to any of the archive content, but if you have the URL of the creator page or any of their individual posts, you can still view them. Vine.co/LoganPaul and Vine.co/JakePaul, for example, still have every Vine that both of the brothers posted until they transitioned away from the platform in 2016.
Individual post URLs still work, too, so https://vine.co/v/iXOpLQEnWIW, for example, still takes you to Logan Paul on the set of "Baywatch" with Dwayne Johnson. As long as you have the URL of the Vine or account you're looking for and they were still up when Twitter turned off the ability to post new content on it, then you should still be able to access it. Not everything is that simple, though, as there are inevitably videos and accounts that we were gone by the time that Vine was shuttered. However, even if they are still hosted on Vine, if you don't know who posted them or when they were posted, they're difficult to find regardless.
Some creators reposted or crossposted their Vines elsewhere
If you know who posted a Vine that you're looking for but you just can't find it for whatever reason, like the account being gone by the time the service went inactive, then you may still have other options. If it's not in the official archive but you have the URL, then you can try looking it up on The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which may have saved the post with the embedded video intact. If you don't have the URL, though, then your best bet is looking to see if the content creator uploaded it to one of their other social media accounts.
So if the creator and question has an account on basically any other platform that lets you upload video, it's worth searching their posts on those platforms to see if they reposted their Vines there. It could be on anything from other short form video platforms like X, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok to those that allow longer video uploaded like YouTube, Facebook, and Daily Motion. Your luck is going to very wildly based on the individual creator, of course, but it's still the simplest way to find an official version of a missing Vine. Logan Paul, for example, posted a compilation of some of his favorite Vines on Facebook in August 2019.
Unofficial uploads are also an option, especially compilations
What if you can't find what you're looking for on one of the creator's other social media pages, or if you don't even know who the creator was in the first place? Or if you're looking for a specific subgenre of videos but are not able to find all of the ones you're looking for?
In that case, your best bet is searching general purpose video sites like YouTube, where — assuming the videos were popular enough — there's a pretty good chance that someone unaffiliated with the original contempt creator uploaded the Vine you're looking for either on its own or as part of compilation. Alternatively, if you're just curious to browse, are giving creator's Vines, if they were popular enough to have various compilations on YouTube, that may just be a preferable way to watch them instead of cycling through a bunch of very short videos.
Numerous YouTubers, for example, have compiled many of Logan Paul's Vines into much longer videos. The top hit for "Logan Paul Vine compilation" is a 30 minute video titled "Logan Paul Best Of ALL TIME Vlog Vines Compilation" that was posted by a channel named Oddly Satisfying Motion. There is nothing notable about the channel, which has just posted a handful of videos over the course of several years, but that one compilation has earned the uploader close to 2 million views as of this writing. There are numerous examples like this, so if it's popular enough, you should be able to find it.