In April of 2018, I decided to follow the Vine compilation trend and make some of my own. Since most of the Vine compilations I had seen were repetitive and mainstream, I wanted to find super rare but funny ones. I spent around 8 hours searching, screen recording, and editing specific Vines I had in mind. I also wanted the compilation to flow like a story, where it kind of made sense having one after the other. After finishing the eight minutes of Vines, I watched it over and over again to make sure it flowed right. I called the video ‘Rare Vines That Were There for Me When my Fish Died (not clickbait).’ I don’t know what exactly sparked this idea, but I thought it was cool and ~quirky~ at the time. Then, I uploaded the video onto my Youtube channel with eight subscribers.
A few days later, I went on my senior class trip to Disney World and saw that my video got 100 views. About a week after that I hit 1000 views, After that, it kept growing more rapidly. I remember hitting 100,000 views and being so stoked about it. I noticed that I got more views at night than during the day. I hit one million views about a month after I uploaded it.
I became obsessed with checking the numbers to see if it went up–which it did. I would read every single comment and like the nice ones and try to ignore the rude ones. Sometimes I responded to people’s comments too. I kept making more Vine compilations to try and please everyone. After making five videos, I just stopped. I took a few months off, and then realized that I would rather upload a variety of videos, not just other people’s vines. I started making my own vlogs very sporadically and it was fun. Some people who liked my Vine compilations stayed for my own content and other people left, but I was okay with that. Some people asked me to make more compilations, but I was done with it. I wanted to make my own content–so I did.