J. Emilio Flores / The New York TimesSkye Townsend, an actress whose videos of herself mimicking Beyoncé are popular on the social media website Vine, records a clip in Los Angeles last week.

When Twitter last year introduced Vine, a slick app that lets people shoot and share short videos, I did what I always do when a buzzy, high-profile service makes its debut: I immediately downloaded it and started playing.

Like Twitter, Vine is designed for brevity: Videos are limited to six seconds and run on a loop. In its early days, comedians, Hollywood studios and quirky stop-motion video artists adopted it.

Though the app intrigued me, I soon found myself struggling to create clips that were entertaining or, at least, interesting. After a few months, I lost interest, deleted the app and mostly forgot about it.

For a while, it seemed that nearly everyone else did, too. The tech press, which had fawned over the service when it began, stopped paying much attention to Vine after Instagram, the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, unveiled a rival service called Instagram Video. It lets users create clips as long as 15 seconds.

But then something curious started to happen. Friends were sending me links to Vine videos via text and instant messages, and I found myself clicking to watch the clips, often several times a day. Such links were popping up constantly on services like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. The sheer proliferation of Vine links seemed to suggest that its popularity wasn’t fading, but possibly surging.

In fact, according to data from comScore, the mobile and Web analytics firm, Vine’s overall traffic has reached 22 million unique visitors a month, compared with 3 million shortly after it started. I realized that I had approached the service in the wrong way: Instead of fumbling with figuring out how to make videos, I should have been enjoying those that others were posting. And now, there are a lot to enjoy.

If Instagram feels like looking at people’s lives through rose-colored glasses, Vine feels like a tour of their chaotic, innermost thoughts. Mostly, the Vine videos that I watch feature young people filming one another dancing (my favorite is the “nae nae”) or performing ill-advised stunts in the spirit of the rambunctious daredevil Johnny Knoxville. Families who film their telegenic offspring saying the darnedest things or making crazy faces is a big attraction, too. In many ways, it feels like the early Web — low stakes, raw and full of reckless abandon.

Vine has become something like a next-generation YouTube, a hotbed of microentertainment, Internet activity and youth culture. It’s even giving rise to its own host of characters and personalities — and is starting to seem like a mini-television network, designed exclusively for mobile.

Some of its most popular users have become hot commodities, trading their fandom into deals with companies that pay them to promote their products and brands. Some have even leveraged the service as a springboard to film and television opportunities.

I asked one of my favorite Vine users, Skye Townsend — a 20-year-old actress living in Los Angeles who makes hilarious, satirical videos of herself as Beyoncé — to explain Vine’s appeal.

“Instagram is for your pictures and Twitter for your thoughts,” she said. “Vine is for your personality.”

Often, that personality comes out best in a quick punch line. Vine is particularly suited for supershort comedy routines like hers, she said, or anything else that can be conveyed and grasped in a few seconds.

“You really have to have great timing,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

She began uploading her impersonations to YouTube when she was 13, but in the last few years drifted away from that platform, calling it unwieldy. “You have to record, edit it in iMovie and upload it to YouTube,” she said. “When I discovered Vine, it was so quick and easy because you can just do them in six seconds.”

Andrew Bachelor, 25, has garnered 6.3 million Vine followers for comedy skits featuring his character KingBach. He says the looping mechanism is a big part of its appeal.

“There’s something about the loop that makes it more enjoyable,” he said. It works particularly well with physical humor, lip-syncing to popular songs, or new dance crazes. You can watch a video loop a few times, he said, letting the humor sink in. Or you can memorize dance moves and later practice them on your own. Some Vine users manipulate the audio component of their creations, creating what he called a “perfect loop” that lets you “set the phone down, and it sounds like a song.”

Both Townsend and Bachelor say that Vine may never grow as large as some of its social media peers, but that it taps into a demographic in high demand among media companies and advertisers.

Bachelor, who has been called “the king of Vine,” has parlayed his success in social media into acting jobs, including a role on “Black Jesus,” a planned cable TV comedy series on Adult Swim. He says its creators are hoping to reach the sort of audience he has assembled on Vine.

“Vine is definitely still underground,” he said. “It’s mostly kids from 12 to 25, and if you’re out of that age range, then you aren’t on your phone and you aren’t watching Vine.”

Vine has something that Twitter desperately needs: highly engaged young users. Last week, the company’s first-quarter earnings report revealed that Twitter was struggling to attract new users and keep them interested.

The company recently introduced a web-based feature to let more people browse popular new Vine videos; it doesn’t require a login or app download for access. But it is not clear what, if any, long-term plans Twitter may have for Vine. Most of the service’s original founders drifted away after it was acquired. Twitter recently hired a product manager from YouTube to oversee Vine, but he was not available for an interview.

Maybe the reason Vine is so delightful and uninhibited is that Twitter executives largely leave it alone. Its thriving community of creators and fans seems to be flourishing quite well on its own.