“What a crazy journey this has been,” she wrote on Twitter. On Instagram, though, she was active five days ago and on Twitter, as recently as Thursday, when she lamented the demise of the beloved app.
Jessica Vasquez, a makeup artist and self-described “professional potato” who goes by Jessi Smiles on Vine, hasn’t posted to that account since March. Vine stars (yes, that is a thing), moved on. The service enjoyed a brief surge in popularity before it got overtaken by Snapchat and Instagram, which introduced 15-second videos later that year. Twitter bought Vine a few months before the service launched in 2013. “It was something funny to end my day on, kind of like a detox,” said Olivia Burger, a sophomore at Gannon University in Erie, Pa. Several college students mentioned looking at Vine at the end of the day, before going to bed, as a way to decompress, especially if the day was tough. On the other hand, had Vine gained mass popularity, it might have lost its edge, the essence of what made Vine Vine, and instead got gobbled up by big brands and sanitized into the mainstream - a bit like what’s happened to Twitter, or Instagram. Vine’s demise is a story of what happens when a cool, edgy, but money-losing service fails to take off with the masses amid competition from heavyweight rivals. Snapchat keeps expanding features, and it isn’t really meant for mindless scrolling of humorous content. Instagram has photos and videos of all sorts. There are alternatives, sure, but nothing as simple as Vine, which did just one thing, and one thing well. Its loyal users are mourning its weirdness, humor and creativity-boosting constraints. That was the beauty of Vine, the simple, pioneering mobile video app that Twitter has decided to kill off. The funniest ones only get more ridiculous with repetition. LaBelle adopted her nephew when her sister, Jacqueline Holte, died in 1989, Vulture reported.NEW YORK – You can watch any video for six seconds, played on an infinite loop. "My name is Dan Purdy, and I am indeed a gay Black man," he said in the video.Ĭomplicating things further, it soon became clear that Dan Purdy was an alias - one of many believed to be used by William "Byl" Holte, Patti LaBelle's nephew, as several Twitter sleuths using open-source investigation techniques found. Not a sock puppet," he wrote in the video's caption. Later on Tuesday evening, the Dan Purdy Twitter account posted a video showing a Black man claiming that he was actually Dan Purdy and that he had sent Browning the message. There were widespread suggestions that Purdy's account might be run by Browning.
Many people won't say it vocally, but do in private."Ī few reporters pointed out that an unverified pro-Trump Twitter account, the owner of which describes himself as "black and gay," has replied to a host of Browning's tweets since the account was created last month. Trump received record minority votes & record LGBTQ votes. "Regarding the tweet that is going viral from my account - I was quoting a message that I received earlier this week from a follower," Browning tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. In a subsequent tweet, he claimed the message was an attempt to quote a real Trump supporter who'd reached out to him and that he'd forgotten to attribute the quote to the man. I feel respected - which I never do when Democrats are involved." -Jacob Rubashkin November 10, 2020īrowning, a former Republican candidate for a Pennsylvania House seat, deleted his post after other Twitter users began to draw attention to it. "Everything is so much better under Trump though. It all began with Browning's tweet: "I'm a black gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me, my life only changed a little bit and it was for the worse," he wrote in response to one of his own tweets. That was only the beginning of a drama that riveted Twitter on Tuesday evening with its twists and turns, ultimately ending in the suspension of one Twitter account believed to belong to the singer Patti LaBelle's nephew, William Holte, also known as Byl Holte. Dean Browning, a white former Republican commissioner of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, tweeted on Tuesday that he is a "black gay guy" who supports President Donald Trump and dislikes former President Barack Obama.