HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through(techcrunch.com) |
HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through(techcrunch.com) |
It has no ads, tracking, social integrations or monetization of any kind. It can never go out of business, it already is out of business! It's an MVP, I just stood it up two days ago.
The whole app bundle is around 700k before splitting. Each 10 question uses about 7kb of additional data. No CSS frameworks, minimal 3rd party deps. Uses the awesome illustrations from undraw.co
I'm working on an offline mode, with the db cached and the service worker acting as back end.
Sorry that got long. I'm going to do a show HN soon. But check it out if you want a simple trivia game on phone or tablet. It's a passion project, in case you can't tell.
Repos: Front github.com/jeremy21212121/trivia-frontend Back github.com/jeremy21212121/express-trivia-server
After a game, it should return you to categories with your category/categories still selected. Pressing next should start a game of the same category.
I'll dig into the server logs and see if I can figure it out. If you feel like it you can open a github issue.
Anyone here interesting in doing a decent front-end to a simple card game e.g. UNO or war or whatever? I will do the backend APIs. I can spare a few $xxx. Hit me up on yoyifo5059@mailboxt.net
Ultimately, there was nothing very "sticky" about it for me. The "once a day" thing is kinda fun, but when there's nothing else to use the App for the other 23 hours of the day, it's easy to break the habit and forget about it.
I actually won once for something like $22, which was pretty good considering it felt like most of the time the winners got about $0.85 each.
Gotta be careful not to sell too much and be a canary in the coal mine to investors buying into the hype.
If done right you win either way.
That's really all that happened here. HQ Trivia had a novelty value that eventually went away. Losing Scott probably didn't help. Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity, I think Scott was a big part of the reason for HQ Trivia's popularity.
[1]: https://theoutline.com/post/2517/is-hq-trivia-holding-its-ho...
Building software to assist in answering questions and win was fun too ;)
There was an article last week about new forms of funding that may make supporting this model more common:
Huge success. Co-founder dies. There was a mutiny to remove the CEO from it's employees Layoffs and now shutdown.
This happened all within about a year? (Cofounder passed in December 2018)
Most people think of the homeless or bums when they think of heroin addiction but there are a lot of very functioning addicts out there in the corporate world
The problems are 1) heroin is highly addictive and has an absolutely ferocious withdrawal and 2) heroin is really easy to overdose.
So, as long as you keep the heroin going, you're "good". The problems all start when the heroin stops.
The founders are ex-Vine founders, who then created a live streaming app called Hype. It looked like they were re-using Hype in HQ according to some URLs like hype.space.
https://github.com/Bekt/hqmania-ai/blob/master/lib/client.js
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ [2] https://pusher.com/
Off topic, but I do wonder what will happen to their ratings when he retires in the next few years.
The Price is Right pulled it off, their ratings are apparently higher now than they had been, since they started putting clips on YouTube and other types of "millennial marketing".
OT and somewhat sad but that... won't happen. He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year. I'm not sure on his exact prognosis of course but... it seems more likely than not that he won't see 2021 (Fs in the chat).
Considering Jeopardy has spread and become immensely popular with similar longevity all over the world, I don't think that's true. It's about the format, not the host.
We also see the same thing happening with the Swedish version of HQ Trivia (called Primetime). It started out extremely popular but lost a lot of momentum fast. They haven't changed hosts so I think that what you say about shelf life is much more intrinsic to the format itself.
Scott was a great host, but Matt and Anna are both great hosts as well. I don’t think anything will happen to Jeopardy, since it’s not a host-centered game in the first place. There are examples of shows pulling off a host switch successfully: new hosts of The Great British Bake-off aka The Great British Baking Show are actually quite better than the original team.
His diet and his refusal of treatment was what killed him.
For some reason I doubt Trebek is the easily-swayed college student Jobs was when the ideas that got him killed overtook him.
Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin is relatively tidy.
Looking back on things it is probably for the best I made minimum wage after high school. The only thing that really tempered my substance abuse was poverty and my aversion to stealing peoples stuff to get high.
Closest I've gotten was Valium given by my oral surgeon as part of some tooth extraction. Wow, Valium is great. I would eat it every day if I had access to it. As a result, I stay totally away from everything. I have back problems that qualify me for opioids, but based on my Valium experience, there's no way I wouldn't go all in. So I manage the pain other ways, exercises, posture, and just gritting my teeth and dealing with the pain.
I had a friend that made homemade Laudanum for helping with cancer pain. Maybe I would do Laudanum if I had that problem and made it myself.
Been through the cancer game.
Three months of mouth radiation and chemo. They numbed me and poked a hole through my stomach to insert a feeding tube since swallowing wasn't going happen after week 5 of radiation kicked in.
The feeding tube was interesting. This was the "You have got to be fucking shitting me Monday".
I basically did not use DDG to look into what was going to happen to me. I wanted to know nothing about chemo, radiation, feeding tubes, and all the other horrors that would come my way. Clean slate, go in ignorant, just deal with it as it happens. This turned out to be the best approach. Like a frog in a warming crock pot. You adjust while your family gazes in horror as you lose your hair and 25% of your mass.
But back to Monday. Radiation at 9AM. Feeding tube at 10AM. Chemo at 2PM. Radiation was nothing. Get my head put in the mesh mask made during the simulation and you go in the machine for 20 minutes. They have Pandora so you can have music piped in during the treatment. I picked New Order.
Then the feeding tube. I was put into the operating room. Then put to sleep. Then I woke up with my sister staring at me in a room that was not the operating room. And I was told they couldn't do the tube. And plan B was needed. I was not told what plan b was until the horrors of plan b were already over. We will get back to plan b in a bit.
Now I will talk about round one of chemo. 2 liters of saline in the vein. Tiny bag of cisplatin. Then two more liters of saline. The entire thing would take 4 hours. But my god. I was nearly cocaine amped. It was a massive rush after chemo for a few weeks. Then it got different and I don't really want to talk about that. There is a reason my radiologist said to remove guns from the house. I can see how suicide would be a good idea.
Back to the feeding tube. They had to send me off to interventional radiology. They had to do a scan while installing the tube. From what I gather my stomach rides high under the ribs and they had to go in through my mouth and push my stomach down and then poke a hole between my stomach and the outside world. And then three things I would describe as "buttons" were stitched in to keep everything in place.
If you get a normal feeding tube you get Advil after you are done. I got 16 hours in a bed with a button that would call someone for a injection of something that would put me to sleep for hours. It was lovely. Like I said. I like drugs.
But I was given Hydromorphone to deal with the insane pain. This is when I realized opioids do fuck-all for me.
But opioids. I just watched that Pharmacist thing on Netflix. And I am kinda pissed off.
Really? Like heroin? When you have cancer you are showered with pills. I got a ton of OXY and they didn't really help. Lorazepam (the best) and Hydrocodone helped the most.
In the documentary they compared OXY to heroin. I get a bit of pain relieve from it (but I have never used it outside cancer). And they said you get high from it. I don't. And I asked my sister and she said oxy didn't get her high either. So I feel a bit cheated. And I have hundreds of oxy just sitting in my medicine cabinet.
You could see this already in their recent GOAT primetime special. Someone did the numbers, it was like 12% of the questions were about Disney properties.
Arguably the hardest quiz on TV (Only Connect) sometimes has stuff from kid's TV shows (e.g. the surnames of Scooby's human companions) but it's still stupidly hard. There's a difference between needing to know which Disney resort is in Florida and needing to be able to know the first four animated feature films Disney made in order.
But the point was that once Alex is gone, there won't be a strong force to keep them from doing that to the regular show. I just hope I'm wrong.
My hope is that they hire Ken Jennings and he carries on the tradition fully in honor of Trebek.
I looked it up and indeed he had pancreatic cancer eight years before he died. Suggests that it's possible for Trebek to live for some time yet given not all forms are untreatable.