Hayes Grier: The Vine Star's Rise and Fall

You’re scrolling late at night, and suddenly your feed is full of the same viral clip: a group of Vine stars huddling together in a grainy, fast-cut video, faces lit up by iPhone screens, and the caption: “End of an era. What now?” There’s confusion, panic, and a weird kind of nostalgia in the comments—people quoting “Do it for the Vine” like it’s a battle cry and asking, “Where do we go?” That’s how millions found out Vine was dead, and that’s the moment Hayes Grier and his friends realized the party was over.

Hayes Grier wasn’t just any internet kid. He was born June 8, 2000, in Mooresville, North Carolina. In 2013, he was only thirteen when he downloaded Vine, an app built for six-second looping videos—short, punchy, and addictive. Vine had just launched on January 24, 2013, after being snapped up by Twitter for around $30 million. It was the wild west for social media creativity, and Hayes wanted in.

He started with quick comedy bits and wild dance moves filmed in his bedroom, sometimes dragging his older brother Nash Grier into the frame. Nash already had a head start—he’d racked up millions of followers, and by 2015, he was standing next to creators like Lele Pons and Brittany Furlan at the top of the charts. But it was Hayes’s energy, that whirlwind of teenage chaos, that started drawing in fans by the thousands. Vine’s culture thrived on punchlines that hit hard and disappeared fast, and Hayes delivered.

By the time Hayes hit high school, his life looked nothing like anyone else’s in Mooresville. He was the third of four kids—just a year or two behind Nash and Will, his oldest brother, who was a college football quarterback. Their house was ground zero for viral stunts and six-second fame. School days were followed by frantic filming, editing, and posting under the hum of fluorescent lights. Sometimes, he’d wake up to thousands of new followers overnight.

Vine’s explosion was sudden. By 2015, the app had 200 million active users. It was so big that companies like Dunkin’ Donuts built ad campaigns around single Vines, and the phrase “Do it for the Vine” became part of the lexicon. Internet personalities, comedians, and musicians all jostled for space on the “For You” page, but teenage stars stood out. Hayes Grier was among that first wave—kids who learned to be performers, editors, and public figures all in the time it takes most people to finish high school.

But the ride wasn’t meant to last. In October 2016, Twitter announced it would be shutting down Vine. The official shutdown came in January 2017. For the creators, the news landed like a gut punch. There were no warning signs for most of them—one day, they woke up with an audience of millions; the next, their platform was evaporating beneath their feet.

Vine’s business model had always been shaky. While looping videos were great for viral fame, monetization was nearly impossible. Marketers wanted more than six seconds, and Instagram and YouTube offered longer formats and better ad revenue. Monetization challenges meant that as soon as Instagram added its own 15-second video feature, advertisers and big creators started to bolt. Reports say that between January and June 2016, more than half of Vine’s users with over 15,000 followers either stopped uploading or deleted their accounts to start over elsewhere.

For Hayes Grier, the shutdown meant facing a crossroads at seventeen years old. He’d built a brand and a following, but overnight, the main stage was gone. Some creators panicked, flooding Instagram and YouTube with content, hoping their fans would follow. Others tried to launch new platforms or pivot to acting and music. Hayes wasn’t ready to disappear.

Almost immediately, Hayes started shifting his attention to newer social apps, testing the waters on Instagram and Snapchat. He wasn’t alone—Vine’s closure sparked a mass migration. Jérôme Jarre, another Vine megastar, was already making headlines for his humanitarian work, but he too had to re-invent his digital identity. Jarre had started on Vine the day it launched, built a following of millions, and even co-founded GrapeStory, a talent agency for Vine and Snapchat creators. After Vine, he pivoted to Snapchat, then left life online almost entirely to focus on philanthropy.

But for younger stars like Hayes, reinvention meant adapting quickly. In 2015, Hayes signed with Creative Artists Agency, securing media and publishing deals and landing a spot on the twenty-first season of Dancing With The Stars at age fifteen. He became the youngest male contestant in the show’s history. He spun his social media presence into TV gigs, authoring his first novel, Hollywood Days with Hayes, in November 2016, and starring in a Hulu show called Freakish.

Meanwhile, the influence of Vine’s culture didn’t die with the app. Its signature humor, rapid pacing, and meme sensibility seeped into new platforms. TikTok, which launched in the U.S. not long after Vine’s shutdown, adopted the short-form video format and quickly became a cultural force. Many of Vine’s former stars, including Hayes’s peers like Jake Paul and Lele Pons, found massive new audiences on YouTube and TikTok, leveraging their existing fanbases.

But the transition wasn’t smooth for everyone. Vine’s shutdown exposed how fragile internet fame could be—how quickly platforms that create stars can also erase them. Not every Vine celebrity managed to carry their following elsewhere. Some found themselves starting again from scratch, their millions of followers lost to the void when Vine’s archive finally came down in April 2018.

For Hayes, the challenge was to prove his relevance beyond a single app. He led his own reality show, Top Grier, focusing on his off-screen life, family, and friends, which premiered on Verizon’s go90 platform in 2016 and was renewed for two more seasons in 2017. That move kept him in the public eye as the rest of the digital landscape shifted beneath his feet.

Jérôme Jarre’s path took a different turn entirely. After using his platform for social good—raising nearly $4 million for drought relief in Somalia and launching campaigns that delivered direct aid via livestream—he became known for rejecting fame altogether. By 2017, he declared himself anti-fame, seeking anonymity and moving away from social media.

The legacy of the Vine era is a digital cautionary tale: internet celebrity is both instant and fragile, propped up by platforms whose priorities can shift overnight. Hayes Grier’s story is entwined with that lesson—a reminder that every follower, every view, every viral laugh is only as secure as the app that hosts it.

And so, as new apps rise and fall, and as former Vine stars chart their own unpredictable courses, one unresolved question lingers: what happens to a generation of creators when the next platform they call home disappears just as suddenly as Vine did?