
HQ Trivia hits 1M players milestone as app soars in popularity - deegles
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/7/16861762/hq-1-million-players-record-milestone-trivia
======
dsl
Last night they hit 1M+ users, but also booted the vast majority of them from
the game by marking the correct answer as incorrect on the first question. The
cynical side of me wonders if it was a load shedding method.

~~~
vesrah
Yeah, I remember seeing a flicker of 1.3M at the very start.

------
davidu
I don't understand the appeal of doing this live. To me, one of the most
valuable characteristics of the Internet is that it is asynchronous by
default. You can create content, and I can view it later. That's the default
state.

Even Snapchat and Instagram Stories let me watch it up to 24 hours after you
publish it.

I fail to see how creating a new constraint that violates the default state of
the Internet makes sense long-term.

Would love to hear the counter argument. Just musing... Perhaps at some point
they will run them in different time zones? That's still not fixing the
asynchronous benefit of the Internet.

To add -- DVRs proved that time-delay is an advantage, and this startup is
undoing that. I'm just so curious how that gets massive scale. I've yet to see
live video get real, meaningful traction and I largely believe it's because
people don't want to always tune in at the same time when the alternative is
far superior.

Another example -- lotto tickets. They have a live drawing, but you can buy
tickets for up to a week in advance (or whatever duration).

~~~
dbbk
You're fixating too much on it being "on the Internet". It's event
entertainment. Just the same as event television. Lots of people love
experiencing things together in the moment, it's more exciting that way.

------
0wl3x
I kind of wish HQ would go away. I know that's mean to say however it's really
a rather buggy app and the game it's self is only marginally fun. Having to
deal with questions not working, the host droning on, the app freezing or
stream crashing makes the experience even less enjoyable. Additionally, the
prize money is going to have to increase if prize is going to be more than a
few $ as they keep getting bigger. Even 10k when split between a few hundred
or a few thousand people gives you a pretty minimal reward. I wonder at what
point the creators are going to start pivoting to advertising to start
underwriting their gameshow.

~~~
lsiq
Also, there's probably already Watsonesque bots out there to ruin the party.

~~~
applecrazy
I’ve prototyped such a bot. See my submissions for the blog post.

Another dev and a HN user, stervy, built something similar and was able to get
around 80% accuracy on old gameplay.

------
creaghpatr
I was hanging out with a group of people a couple days ago and all of a sudden
3 or 4 pulled out their phones at the same time with this giddy expression on
their face [for HQ trivia].

It was pretty jarring, though not necessarily in a bad way.

------
nwsm
Had a lot of fun playing with the whole family around the holidays. That was
the first time I'd heard of the app but apparently it's been around for months
and are still growing; I figured they would have peaked around New Year's.

It's getting annoying to play the game every day at 2pm/8pm central. They are
still having load issues it seems, and winning typically require you to get
lucky as towards the end the questions can get pretty obscure.

Wonder how long they have before they need to monetize.

------
applecrazy
I wonder what they’re going to use to mitigate cheating. But give the recent
uptick in technical difficulties, they have bigger things to worry about.

------
deegles
I would love to know more about their software architecture... 1+ million
concurrent streams is no joke! Have they published anything about it?

~~~
nhelterbrand
It's been really buggy lately and I wonder if they're at the point of
confidence yet to start publishing their architecture

