gone, but not forgotten
October 5, 2024
For some reason, my instinctual method of interfacing with the internet was to not do it. Any interactions I had would be as indirect as possible. When I first got Twitter in 2016, I treated likes and retweets as though they were badges of approval, and was very deliberate about which tweets were good enough to get these. Despite watching certain YouTube channels regularly, I didn’t create a YouTube account to subscribe to them for about a year or two. Instead, I bookmarked the channels on my iPad’s Safari browser, and checked each channel manually every day after school. There were about ten, which I had sorted by upload frequency, and I only remember a few: GameXplain, PeanutButterGamer, The Game Theorists, GTLive, and Fawful’s Minion.
One day in the mid 2010s, I was watching a new episode of GTLive. I wish I could remember which one; I think it was for Super Mario Maker. At some point, MatPat talked about how, among the recent popularity of the mobile trivia game Trivia Crack, he actually preferred a different trivia game called QuizUp. Being the easily impressionable tween that I was, I immediately went to go download it, despite not even liking trivia.
QuizUp’s main draw was its topics. Instead of spinning a wheel to choose one of six broad categories, you would instead choose from hundreds of categories, and exclusively answer questions in that topic. The official ones could’ve been anything from zoology to Star Wars, and they also allowed for user-created topics, which meant even more options. (Although the user-created ones were extremely hit-or-miss.) One in particular I was quite fond of was a brand logo quiz, where you would be shown a logo with the text removed, and guess which company it was for.
Despite the large number of topics, a lot of them didn’t really appeal to me at that age. The music category was oriented around “popular” music, and if you’ve read any of my music reviews, you know that’s not my strong suit. The video games one was focused on more “big budget” titles like Assassin’s Creed, and being a Nintendo kid, I didn’t know much about any of them. They did have categories for a few specific games, though, and one of the main ones I played was Pokémon. It actually had two official categories: a general Pokémon one, and one called “Who’s that Pokémon?” which, if you've seen the TV show, you can imagine what that one is like.
At some point, QuizUp got updated to include a social media style timeline, where people could post under certain topics, and people who followed that topic would see it on their timeline. I have no idea how this worked logistically; I think nowadays it would’ve been hell on earth to moderate, and the concept would’ve been left on the cutting room floor. I guess Reddit and Amino work similarly, but posts and communities were their whole thing, while QuizUp’s main focus was the actual trivia game. I guess they found a way to make it work somehow. I don’t even think there were ads, which is crazy to think about nowadays, when every fourth tweet on Twitter is promoted, Instagram shows you an ad every three stories, and YouTube shows you two ads before every video. (even more if you’re watching on a TV)
Regardless, this was my introduction to strangers online; prior to this, the only “social media” platform I used was Instagram, and it was exclusively to follow my friends. Among those in my grade who would’ve been considered “chronically online” in today’s terms, many of the boys grew up on iFunny, and many of the girls grew up on Tumblr. As is often the case for me, I somehow stumbled onto the cultural road less traveled.
Speaking of iFunny, I remember following an official QuizUp topic called “Funny” when this social update came out. I don’t even remember what the actual trivia questions were like; all I know is that that’s how I got access to memes at that time, many of which were branded with that infamous iFunny watermark at the bottom. (My personal favorites at the time were the physics-based trollface comics. There was one involving magnets and flying that legitimately stumped my dumb ass—I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work.)
I never made any posts, (I’m what would be called a “lurker”) but I was fascinated by this concept. Any topic available on QuizUp had a community of people that all shared that one interest, and could talk about it with each other. None of the topics I followed were all too active. (Or at least relative to what would now be considered an active community.) Most of the time you’d be getting occasional reposts of fanart. I’d followed a fanmade Undertale topic, since I’d just discovered it around this time, but even that wasn’t very consistent. The main topic I remember looking at posts from though was Pokémon.
The Pokémon topic started out like the others, with mostly fanart reposts, but eventually, there were a few regulars that came into relative prominence. I wish I could recall more of them; they were extremely formative characters in my middle school life. I only vaguely remember two from the Pokemon community, and I’m not sure if I remember the details correctly. One went by the name -infinity- (stylization included) and had a Hatsune Miku profile picture. She(?) posted in all lowercase, and was always energetic and full of life. The other one’s name escapes me, but his(?) favorite Pokémon was Raichu, and almost all of his posts were accompanied by Raichu fanart. He was always calm and level-headed, even during the one instance of drama I can recall, and the other members of the community treated him with the respect of a parental figure. If this text somehow reaches either of you, or anyone else I’ve forgotten from the Pokemon QuizUp topic, I want to thank you for helping to create such a fun community, one which served as a safe part of the internet I could visit from time to time and know that I wasn’t alone out there. I hope you guys are doing well.
(Note: This was long before the concept of stating your preferred pronouns became mainstream. My memory claims that these two identified as female and male respectively, but I’m not sure if that was ever stated directly by them or if my younger self assumed their genders without knowing better. If the latter is the case, I apologize.)
While building The Garden, I was revisiting some early internet memories, which led me to wonder what was up with QuizUp nowadays. It turns out that the app had been on a steady decline after its original developers, Plain Vanilla, shut down the company and sold QuizUp to Glu Mobile, who did nothing but host the servers until 2021, where the game was officially shut down. (source) As much as I wish it didn’t, in our current market, profitability has to come first, so I understand why this happened. But what really got to me was the lack of any sort of archive.
QuizUp had basically become a miniature social media platform, with millions of users bonding over common interests, and all of their accounts, friend lists, posts, achievements, and user-created topics are now gone. I had wanted to redownload the game, to see if I could manage to log in to my old account and walk down memory lane, but that isn’t possible now. Growing up, I was always told that anything I post on the internet is forever, but I know now this isn’t true. The recent case against the Internet Archive solidifies this; if there is no financial incentive for mass preservation, it will not be done, and if things aren’t preserved, they will be lost to time. I suppose this is my way of doing what little archival work I can.