Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia

I found Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia to be interesting, but I don't think it would be that fascinating to anyone who never played HQ. I didn't have the app back in the day, but my coworkers did and we played it almost every lunch break. It was a lot of fun. I don't remember why we stopped playing, exactly, but this documentary made me wonder if we started seeing the cracks in the system. However, this isn't an objective film. The filmmakers definitely had an angle and they veer off on some random paths. It also doesn't answer some of the big questions I had. Still, it's thought-provoking.

Why is it so difficult to tell a decent story anymore? I'm not sure why this seems to be so difficult but I am really tired of all these nobodies being included with nothing to offer to the actual story but eating the clock for run time and fluffing the story.

And then we're subjected to, of all people, the 45- year old teenager, Taylor Lorenz? Absolutely no. Notice she 'transcribed' the conversation and not recorded? And she calls herself a journalist, but doesn't bother to record? Okay then.

Then some dude is crying halfway through, there's accusations flying all over with nothing substantive to the claims, and the insanity just gets worse from there. Some woman talking about some ridiculous 'boys club' where she took it upon herself to clean things and *gasp* as a low level staffer was asked to get coffee! Yet she went to work every day and kept right on going?

This was like a gossipy-teenage angsty-whine session that goes nowhere.

Can we please stop with the schizophrenic nonsense with stories? Get to the point and make it. All these morons with nothing to add are unnecessary and unwanted.

As "Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia" (2023 release; 88 min) opens, it is "2012, New York", and two guys,, Rus and Colin, are turning heads with their innovative Vine app, allowing for 6 second videos (yes, TikTok before there was TikTok. Vine gets snapped up by Twitter, which then inexplicably shuts it down after 2 years. Colin and Rus then start the HQ Trivia in August, 2017 with exactly 284 users... At this point we are 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from documentary director Selima Koroma ("Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street"). Here she assesses the very rapid rise, and even quicker fall, of HQ Trivia. The documentary brings is in a breezy way. The film makers interview all of the right sources, including some with HQ and also several tech reporters. The documentary exposes the rifts and other problems between Colin and Rus, and it all feels quite remarkably similar to that other documentary from earlier this year on the rise and fall of BlackBerry. Along the way in the film we got the following trivia question: All all startups, how many meet their demise: 10 percent? 50 percent? 90 percent? The correct answer is of course the latter. I'm frankly surprised that the percentage isn't higher.

"Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia" premiered on CNN in March, and started streaming on Max this weekend. I caught it last night. I was a little surprised that as of now this movie is rated 100% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, as that feels a bit too high for me. That aside, if you, are in the mood for a breezy and entertaining documentary about yet another tech company's rapid rise and even quicker demise, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.