What happens when the short-form video bubble pops?

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On December 31st, 2012 , I sat in a little conference room in Times Square with a team of bloggers and “live GIF’d” the New Year’s Eve ball dropping for Tumblr. We had laptops, some screen-capture software, and a live feed of what was happening outside and were meant to make, like, funny little clips out of it for Tumblr’s official accounts. I got a few hundred bucks, a free dinner, and tickets to see Carley Rae Jepsen perform next door at the Hard Rock Cafe for my trouble. None of us knew it yet, but this was the end of the animated GIF era. A few weeks later, Vine would launch, officially opening the Pandora’s Box of short-form video and sending the GIF, at least the viral GIF, to the dustbin of history.

The pre-Vine animated GIF boom has mostly been memory-holed. [Ed. note: Unless you’re still on Tumblr, where GIFs and GIF-sets still constitute a large percentage of posts.] In the early 2010s, message board users were moving from smaller websites to larger platforms — and getting jobs at digital media companies. And they ended up bringing a lot of shared culture with them. What we used to call “Weird Twitter,” for instance, started as a group of Something Awful users. YouTube was still in its infancy and embeds didn’t always play nice with different social media sites. So the animated GIF was sort of a hack, one that had worked on older message boards. By 2012, GIFs were so popular that they were being used to cover the election that year. But GIFs were annoying to make. You needed specialized software or a legacy version of Photoshop that could still export them. And they were deeply disposable. There was very little value in making a viral GIF. Vine fixed this.

You turned on your phone camera, recorded six seconds of video (with audio, which GIFs didn’t have), and it was attached to your username and had a view count. Also, in the words of my old media professor, Jamie Cohen, Vine’s six-second limit was the perfect length to convey “a complete sentence in the grammar of video.” Perfect for the nascent digital creator and influencer industries, and even more perfect for brands. The golden age of Vine was short-lived, though. It went into read-only mode in 2016 and, by that point, every other platform (including Twitter) had built their own native short-form video feature. And we had already started using the term “pivot to video” as a catch-all for what we now understand as the self-destructive cycle of publishers lighting their budgets on fire to chase video views on platforms they don’t own to attract audiences that will never leave those platforms.

What followed were different fleeting periods of short-form video cycling in and out of fashion due to algorithmic whims. Facebook wanted slideshows and, later, “videos” that were just a still image. Twitter users just started making slightly longer Vines (and sharing sports clips), Instagram incentivized Stories and glossy influencer videos, and then, finally, by the end of the decade, the TikTok was king, which reliably kept things fresh until Trump entered office and squashed it. But here in 2026, standing atop the corpses of a million NowThis’s and AJ+’s and BuzzFeed’s, even without TikTok, short-form video is the apex predator of internet content. Or, perhaps, more accurately, it’s the crab. The format that everything continues to evolve into.

But there was an assumption that carried across Vine, Facebook Watch, TikTok, and Instagram Reels that the economics of scale and attention would eventually make sense. That short-form video would eventually mean something. That either creators would get the chance to “graduate” from short-form video to TV and movies or, at the very least, make something that felt more important. Instead, things have only become stupider and more wasteful, as platforms demand more video content than ever.

We now call the majority of the short videos we see online “clips,” and the practice of making them, “clipping.” I first noticed this back in 2023, when I discovered a network of pornstars making clips for Instagram that looked like podcast interviews, which they were using to promote their OnlyFans accounts. It is, definitively, the atomic unit of content of the 2020s. Whether it’s a street fight on a livestreamer’s Kick account, a politician’s speech, a raunchy podcast interview, a missile strike, or an out-of-context movie scene with an AI-generated voice summarizing it. Every social platform is a video platform and every video is a snippet of something else from somewhere else.

But I’m a big believer in the idea that once something online has a name — a trend, a meme, a “meta” — it is, effectively, already over. Or, at the very least, immediately oversaturated to the point that it’s worth asking what’s next. And there have been a slew of stories lately — the rise of the Kick livestreaming platform, the sale of TBPN to OpenAI, Coachella canceling influencer deals, the recent panic over the band Geese, the simple fact people are acknowledging that clipping is even a thing — that, taken together, feel like a breaking point. The idiotic, bloated, nonsensical endpoint of a journey that started with Vine and the death of the GIF all those years ago.

In an essay on X last week, Ed Elson, host of the Prof G Markets podcast, defined the “clip” as something distinct from “short-form content,” writing, “They are specifically snippets of long-form content — things like podcasts, livestreams, and TV shows — a byproduct of something else. In other words, every clip is short-form content, but not all short-form content is a clip.” He argued in a followup post that, counterintuitively, even though a clip, according to his definition, is a slice of a larger product, they have become the main product for the majority of audiences. And the entertainment industry has noticed.

Hollywood studios are hiring clippers to make fan edits for social, Disney+ is launching a TikTok-style feed called Verts, Netflix is, as well, and microdramas are a billion dollar industry. And on the other, far darker (and dumber) side of the media landscape, last week, Braden Peters, the 20-year-old looksmaxxer better known as Clavicular, shared a chart ranking Kick streamers by clips. These clips were not made by fans, but through a freelance clipping service called ClippingExe. Kick offers its own paid clipping service through their creator program. But neither of these strategies — converting your intellectual property into short-form video or paying an army of clippers to make it for you — fixes the core problem, which is, incidentally, the very same problem animated GIFs had back in the 2010s: The majority of this stuff is disposable trash.

For all that’s been written about the coming AI crash, very little has been written about the short-form video collapse that is clearly just over the horizon. The companies and content farms flooding your feed with clips to make it seem like a particular podcaster or streamer is actually popular and the platforms themselves clearly inflating view counts to keep advertisers satisfied. And because many creators are doing this (thanks to short-form video, everything is content, and everyone who makes anything is a creator), we assume it’s true for everything that’s “popular.” A death spiral for human creativity that, I would argue, is on par with AI. Though, of course, AI can make short-form videos now.

GQ’s Senior Culture Editor Alex Pappademas wrote about this new hyperreal internet landscape in a piece over the weekend. “Our ability to perceive any event accurately is under attack, and this is reshaping all our lives so profoundly and so quickly that the comparatively simple idea of Geese being an industry plant is on some level psychically soothing,” he argued. “Something we can get our hands around as we attempt to process what’s really an existential earthquake and then go back to work.”

The only thing I disagree with Pappademas on is that this existential earthquake, as he calls it, is a forgone conclusion. That we are doomed to an unending world of short-form video slop. An internet permanently swallowed whole by bodybuilders and pornstars and fascists and dropshippers and gambling ads and Italian AI crocodiles and all the other evils of late-stage digital video. But the same way I believe that by the time something online has a name it’s already over, I also believe in the limitless capacity of American classism. The takeaway for me from the Geese debacle is not that a bunch of huge fucking losers are getting money from record labels or whatever to astroturf fan campaigns for indie bands. It’s that the current state of short-form video is so unbelievably rancid that it has become inhospitable to anyone with an actual fanbase. There is a delicious irony here. That social platforms could be made irrelevant by their own pivot to video. Congrats, Silicon Valley, you built an infinite Jerry Springer machine and no one wants to use it anymore because it makes them look like Jerry Springer.

This is where you would be right to ask, “OK, sure, yes, but what could replace short-form video?” And I’m not going to write some big millennial cope session here about how internet users will all suddenly get better taste and stop being hypnotized by better content or — lol — start reading again. They have, historically, never done that. We are drawn to garbage, of course. But we quickly get bored of it, slowly and then all at once. And it will happen again. In fact, I’d argue it is already happening.

I’ve been sitting on this take for a few weeks now, chipping away at it from different angles, because I’m always a little nervous to declare something as “dead.” But this morning, as I was writing this, Andreessen Horowitz announced the launch of MTS, or “Monitoring The Situation,” a livestream covering “technology, business, politics, and culture,” that streams all day long on X. It is both a shameless rip-off of TBPN and a glorified clip farm for reactionary Silicon Valley CEOs. Marc Andreessen is guesting on it today. And, well, I really couldn’t have asked for better proof than that!

Just like the switch from animated GIFs to Vine, whatever comes next won’t feel like exactly the same thing, and may actually be worse in the long run, but the minute it arrives you won’t even remember what you were doing — or watching — before.

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