How TikTok Bridged The Gap Between Vine And YouTube

With all the recent talk surrounding potential bans on TikTok, it is important to think about the impact this would have on memes. While there are some in the memeosphere that would rather not think of TikTok on the same level as other meme genres or websites, the video-sharing platform has proven to be a key part of overall meme evolution. In order to truly get a sense of understanding for TikTok's role in the grand meme of things, it is important to look at how we got to this point.

In the earlier days of internet meme culture, people often used Demotivational Posters as some of their first formats. This style of static image memes continued to grow and evolve, eventually producing other versions, such as Advice Animals and reaction images.

The only way to advance further than static images was to progress to moving ones, thus reaction GIFs became a heavily dominant medium, producing examples like the evergreen Michael Jackson popcorn reaction used for watching drama unfold online. Years of meme evolution eventually culminated in Vine, where moving images and sound combined into one to give a complete video meme experience on a platform dedicated to that genre. Unfortunately, this triumph could not last, and Vine shut down in 2016, rather unexpectedly.

With the end of Vine, the progression of video memes stagnated in many ways. Video memes of that style were sorely missed, as most other examples had to be on YouTube and were often bigger sketches or compilations of smaller ones. Six-second Vines did not do well on YouTube, and longer-form videos did not do well on most other social media platforms. Memes returned to be primarily dominated by static images, and eventually, that progressed into the development of things like Surreal Memes.

Then, like a breath of fresh air, TikTok emerged, and there was a sudden explosion in the video meme format. TikTok had the same short-form video capabilities that Vine had, but it also had some quality of life improvements that nobody knew they wanted in the next meme platform, which contributed to its rapid rise in adoption. The introduction of TikTok Duets with split-screen reactions was absolutely phenomenal for video meme creation, as reaction memes, multi-part story memes and other highly creative endeavors could be produced much easier than ever before.

TikTok memes showed that the memeosphere was hungry for such video formats and that the gap between seven-second Vines and three-minute YouTube clips wasn’t as large anymore, as TikTok videos of various lengths have enjoyed viral success. These memes eventually became so viral that they could not be contained just in TikTok, bleeding into Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube with compilations and specific users gaining followings. Just as some Vine stars were able to transition into careers on other places like YouTube, it's hoped that TikTok creators will adapt and continue producing some of the much-needed video memes if their main platform is ultimately shut down in the future.

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