Remember when Vine was dominating social media? It appears that the six-second video platform may possibly make its way back.
In case you didn’t know: Twitter bought Vine for $30 million in 2012, but in October 2016, the company announced that it would shut down.
It’s reported that Vine didn’t support content creators because of its social media competitors, lack of monetization, and ads.
A possible comeback on the horizon: Musk has been said to have been in talks of revitalizing Vine for months, per the outlet. The goal at hand seems to be to make the platform “better” than Vine based on one of Musk’s Twitter polls.
Twitter engineers “have been assigned to look at Vine’s old code base, which hasn’t been changed or updated since the shutdown.” Additionally, one source told the outlet that “it needs a lot of work.”
The turn of events follows Musk buying Twitter. As previously reported by AfroTech, he officially completed the $44 billion acquisition in October,
In addition to bringing Vine back, Musk is looking to revamp the Twitter verification process. The idea is to charge $8 per month for users to keep their blue check. Initially, his plan was $20 per month but criticism online knocked it down.
“[W]e need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers,” Musk tweeted in response to Stephen King. “How about $8?”
We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Additionally, since acquiring Twitter, hate speech has skyrocketed.
As AfroTech previously reported, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) shared that the use of the N-word on the platform increased by an estimated 500 percent following Musk’s acquisition.