As the writer Kasai Richardson posted on Twitter, “black youth did more with six seconds than Hollywood has done with six decades.” Most popular Vines were truly entertaining, even cinematic. But they also began conversations — however small — about the dynamics of comedy and culture created by black people. Chiefly, Vine was an exercise in how many black people talk among ourselves — in code and allusion — and how we telegraph blackness to white people, who may not know any black people besides the ones who live in their phone.

Blackness is inherently political, but a number of black comedic Vines weren’t, perhaps making it easier for white kids to latch onto — there weren’t murky politics to consider. Many black Vine stars relied on familiar tropes to appeal to black people but, in turn, may have reinforced stereotypes for white people, who received the content without the tacit understanding that everyone else is in on the joke.

Still, that didn’t stop Vine from functioning as a de facto FUBU — for us, by us — space for black people, where we could reinsert ourselves into a mainstream that excluded us, skewer our own culture (however safely) and create something new, a phenomenon that is relatively rare. There are few spaces to provide the public with black ingenuity; Vine, in its own small way, was a digital exposition of black achievement.

It was fitting, then, that Twitter announced the discontinuation of Vine the same day the “coat-switching” scandal hit the internet. In an article about the film “Moonlight,” the film critic for The Toronto Star misheard the term “code-switching,” a practice of alternating language or behavior based on the environment and atmosphere, and giddily included the eggcorn in promoting the article. It was a perfect example of how the experiences of minorities are often misconstrued. Vine was a place where you were either on the joke or you weren’t, and so help you if you weren’t.

Vines were six rapid seconds of fun, a flash of candy down a throat. My favorite Vine wasn’t a lifesaver or a masterwork; it just cheered me up more quickly than any other emotional fix in my arsenal. It’s called “Black people only need 3 claps to turnnn up!” — the premise is uncomplicated, and it manages to be cheeky, tender, nostalgic, surprising, hilarious, painfully true and black-as-all-get-out, all in the span of six seconds.

Vine was never that deep: it wasn’t designed to spark a national conversation on race, culture, appropriation, ownership and identity. Its effect and utility, though, as a venue for black art to be created disseminated and understood, will be its legacy. Nobody ever tried to change the world with a Vine. But it served as the best place to get away from the world for a while.