Throughout the world of the internet… 2 apps have haunted the lives of middle schoolers everywhere…Vine, harbringer of awful comedy…. and Music.ly … well, we don’t talk about Music.ly.

I suppose I should explain. Vine is an app where you can record skits or videos, but they have to be under 6 seconds. Music.ly is a similar app where you can film yourself lip-syncing to songs. And no, you can’t actually sing along. Just lip-sync.

Today I will be talking about these two apps, and taking a critical view of their business practices. But before I start talking about these apps, I will say that I don’t hate all social media. I’m not much of a grump. I see the point of Instagram, Twitter, Discord, YouTube & even Snapchat. But these apps push me over the limit. Specifically, I just don’t understand the point of Vine and Music.ly in particular.

Vine: As I said above, Vine lets you record short videos under 6 seconds. My 1st question about this way of recording videos: why? Why would you willingly record videos in under 6 seconds when you could record a video in any other length and put it on YouTube? And as for the “comedy” in these sort of videos? They incessantly rely on “XD Random” humor, with people screaming a few sentences or saying weird things into a crappy i-phone camera.

The point of these videos escapes me. They are too short, have awful non-sequitur comedy, and just leave you with an empty feeling. Quite a few of the videos even rely on “Huah Huah dat person luks ugly LOL funnny” And that’s not to say you cant make funny or creative videos on the service, there are lots of interesting stop motion videos on the app.

Music.ly: OK, so Vine has some good aspects, like the stop motion stuff. It’s possible to be creative and interesting on Vine. But not so on Music.ly. You literally just lip-synch to pop songs. That’s it. To get popular on the app, you basically have to look pretty to 11-year-old girls. It requires no talent, no skills, just a blandly attractive face. In addition, the people who use Music.ly continually use it for shady and borderline illegal stuff. Music.ly “pretty boys” use the apps live feature to force their young fans to donate money to them using their parent’s money, and when they do, the Music.ly star will either give them a shoutout or take off their shirt on camera, sometimes doing worse. Music.ly “stars” have also branched of into MAKING music. As most Music.ly stars just lip-synch, they have little to no singing skills, and usually no talent, so their music is almost always awful. Music.ly has been shut down, much like Vine. So that’s good, right? Well… recently it’s been replaced by an app called Tik Tok…. Which is exactly the same thing.

Overall, I can’t fathom why either of these apps are popular. They are both endlessly vapid and are inhabited by talentless “stars”. Hopefully, we as a nation will grow out of this awful phase.