NEW YORK (AP) - You can watch any video for six seconds, played on an infinite loop. The funniest ones only get more ridiculous with repetition.
That was the beauty of Vine, the simple, pioneering mobile video app that Twitter has decided to kill off. Its loyal users are mourning its weirdness, humor and creativity-boosting constraints.
There are alternatives, sure, but nothing as simple as Vine, which did just one thing, and one thing well. Instagram has photos and videos of all sorts. Snapchat keeps expanding features, and it isn't really meant for mindless scrolling of humorous content. Facebook, well, we all know Facebook.
Vine's demise is a story of what happens when a cool, edgy, but money-losing service fails to take off with the masses amid competition from heavyweight rivals. On the other hand, had Vine gained mass popularity, it might have lost its edge, the essence of what made Vine Vine, and instead got gobbled up by big brands and sanitized into the mainstream - a bit like what's happened to Twitter, or Instagram.
"Vine is a very unique app in that it requires the smallest amount of attention. Watching YouTube videos, reading Facebook posts or even looking at tweets takes more concentration than watching a six-second clip," said Carling Crawford, 19.
Crawford, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, fondly recalled classic Vines, such as the one titled "A Potato Flew Around My Room Before You Came," which, as its name suggests, shows a potato tied to a ceiling fan and flying around a room. In the time you read this sentence, it already played twice. It has been played more than 23 million times and "revined," or shared, nearly 9,000 times.
Several college students mentioned looking at Vine at the end of the day, before going to bed, as a way to decompress, especially if the day was tough.
"It was something funny to end my day on, kind of like a detox," said Olivia Burger, a sophomore at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Twitter bought Vine a few months before the service launched in 2013. The service enjoyed a brief surge in popularity before it got overtaken by Snapchat and Instagram, which introduced 15-second videos later that year. Vine stars (yes, that is a thing), moved on.
Jessica Vasquez, a makeup artist and self-described "professional potato" who goes by Jessi Smiles on Vine, hasn't posted to that account since March. On Instagram, though, she was active five days ago and on Twitter, as recently as Thursday, when she lamented the demise of the beloved app.
"What a crazy journey this has been," she wrote on Twitter. "Forever grateful for that silly little app."
Vine also attracted some unlikely fans, such as the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, perhaps best known for protesting the funerals of fallen soldiers with inflammatory anti-gay signs. The organization has some 13,000 followers on Vine, and its six-second posts display hateful messages in often-humorous contexts.
"(With) heavy boots and a sad heart, we do not look forward to the end of Vine. Alas, it was so young with so much promise. We protest Vine's funeral!" the church said in an emailed statement Friday.
More importantly perhaps, Vine was popular with black and Hispanic teens and 20-somethings, often more so than with their white counterparts. According to the Pew Research Center, 31 percent of black teens used Vine as of 2015, compared with just 22 percent of white, non-Hispanic teens.