IIRC Vine and Coub made it mainstream more than 12 years ago, it’s not something new. Gifs are basically a prequel of the format.
If people wouldn’t like it, it wouldn’t survive this long, and wouldn’t be copied by every other company and requested in threads like this. It’s alright if you don’t like them but please let other people have fun. You don’t have to “learn” from everything, it’s just jokes and light entertainment.
Source
Twitter was financially in a bad shape for a long time, the first year they generated some profit was 2018. Source Vine existed 2012-2017, I think they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Twitter was a text based platform, tiktok was designed for video from conception.
But I still don’t know why they didn’t try to sell it instead of shutting it down.
Coub was also nearly shut down in 2022, it seems like it’s hard to profitably maintain a short video service.
One more thing could have an important impact was music rights. Tiktok has special deals with record labels for background music, Coub was Russian, so they could just pirate music. Streaming wasn’t big back than, only spotify existed, labels couldn’t figure yet out how to milk internet users, so I guess Vine couldn’t get as good deals as it would now. Too early, too legal.