‘LOL OMG that bag is so cute, give it to me’ — A Tribute to Skateboard Vine

Last week, Twitter announced that it will be shutting down Vine.

Vine, much like Twitter itself, was never huge with skaters. It was, however, the low-key link that caused a sizable chunk of skateboarding posted online to move from YouTube to Instagram. Vine was the original easy-share video platform, and had it not posed a threat to a once photos-only Instagram in 2013, the fate of the slappy front nose 270 out would be far different.

The majority of skateboard Vines were unremarkable. Six-seconds was too short to share an average line or manual trick. It was far better suited for showcasing the brilliance of teenagers, snowballing dance crazes, and coining slang that has become commonplace far outside of its original context. A few people excelled at skateboard Vine — the Bust Crew / Richmond dudes, Peter Sidlauskas, Pat Stiner was always good at archiving bits of nostalgia — but it was never a ubiquitous part of every skateboarder’s life much the way Instagram videos are.

Lurker Lou once dubbed Vine “the wild west of social media.” It had no rules; easy-share videos were still a new concept in 2013 and part of the fun was watching everyone figure it out. People did so in different ways. Vine was the original breeding place for the visual vocabullary that makes up the beloved Dime Instagram videos of today. Other people took bits from the greater Vine ecosystem and remixed them into skateboarding, e.g. throwing a “boy if you don’t!” after Dave Bachinsky’s El Toro downplay. It was also the best place to receive a barrage of highlights from any video part that dropped earlier in the day, or somewhere to clown skateboarding in a playful tone that barely exists on Instagram, where everyone is promoting something.

Nobody was trying to get sponsored off Vine, which made it a special place to share skateboarding, and more importantly, laugh at it.

Below is a compilation of some favorites, which are all [sometimes loosely] skateboard related. Fuck you, I don’t want no ravioli.

And yeah, I couldn’t resist including “This is how I enter my house” even though it has nothing to do with skateboarding.