This summer, TikTok, an app through which users record themselves dancing, lip-syncing, and performing comedic sketches, blew up. While many consider this new app a refreshing new take on the now-obsolete Vine, TikTok has been condemned the inferior app in comparison to Vine.

Quick recap: Vine was created by Dom Hofman and was popularized in 2013 with 200 million active users. Eventually, this social media platform became synonymous with YouTube, a goliath in the social media industry. However, this success was short-lived, for the app shut down on December 16, 2016. Once the users of the app heard this news, they instantly took to other social media platforms and, in solidarity, produced the hashtag #ripvine.

Fast forward to September 2016: ByteDance, a company stationed in China, bought out Muscial.ly and renamed the application TikTok, which now resembles the fast tempo of the dated Vine. This app was once labeled cringy, with people constantly lip-syncing and attempting to appear attractive for the audience. However, many people downloaded the app for the cringy content and began to upload their own videos, some being humorous or DIY based, and the app instantly gained popularity in the summer of 2019 and has been thriving ever since.

The two apps have many similarities, beginning with the ability to capture and maintain a person’s attention for hours on end. Both Vine and TikTok are able to do this by limiting their users to upload short videos: Vine allotting six seconds and TikTok allowing either fifteen or thirty seconds. TikTok also has simple editing tools and effortless ways to include voice-overs, unlike Vine. These easy tools help the users of TikTok to use the voice-overs as a main part of their video, whether it be a song they lip-sync to, or a scene from a movie they attempt to recreate with the edits. With these capabilities, the users of TikTok rely heavily on editing to make what would be a mediocre video more intriguing to watch.

However, many people argue that Vine is the superior app, stating that the users of Vine are more talented because they needed to produce original content that fits in six seconds, while TikTokers consistently use the voice-over feature to mime jokes or songs, without giving the creator credit. In addition, many of the videos that are famous on TikTok either began a trend or was a part of one. Vine content creators were unable to easily apply edits to their videos, so the Viners have less of a cushion to fall back on, and cannot rely on the edits to make the short clip funny. These factors cause more people to side with Vine being the better application.

The users of Vine will always miss the beloved app, even though companies attempt to recreate the obscure content of the app, nothing will be able to truly capture the spirit of the application.