On Quizzes and Obsessions
First published: Friday June 10th, 2022
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Quizzes are the building block of JetPunk. They’re the reason most of us are here — we were either attracted by the quizzes or the thought of making our own. And a lot of users make excellent quizzes, I won’t deny that. Sadly, there are a large amount of spam quizzes whose sole purpose is to generate takes.
Perhaps this is a retrospective, perhaps it isn’t — I don’t really check the Recent User Quizzes page anymore. I know these used to be extremely common, however nobody spoke up and said anything about them. What a pity.
Fast typing. Who remembers those? Greedy JetPunkers made them so they would get takes from unsuspecting people wanting to beat their own record. And it usually worked. Many got thousands of takes. And then there were the quizzes that simply had low value. Random quizzes where they would yell at you to type in the answers, securing not only takes but lots of comments. And then there were just plain bad quizzes. Ones the quiz maker couldn’t be bothered to finish. Those were always my least favorite.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that JetPunk is fueled by desire, the desire for takes, nominations, and comments. In other words, the desire for fame. People make these spam quizzes because they want to be noticed. And it doesn’t stop because nobody’s telling them to stop. People just accept these spam quizzes.
Maybe it’s time to close up shop. Maybe it’s time to just move on. I don’t know.
Some of these quizzes are excellent (others I mean not mine) and deserve more recognition, but are swallowed up in the amount of spam and poorly made quizzes. As a result many truly excellent quizzes will be missed. I always nominate a quiz I feel is worthy and would encourage others to do the same.
"however nobody spoke up and said anything about them"
I do remember seeing some drama in the comments of low effort quizzes. It's just that this topic is rarely brought to the RUB. I have written like 2 blogs on this long ago I believe, although I had practically no credibility at the time and barely knew how to make quizzes myself.
That said, there are an enormous amount of nonsensical troll quizzes. There are endless quizzes where the creator wouldn't take 10 seconds to use the search bar to discover all sorts of the same quiz, but spent some time to make one of their own.
As much as people debate answers and radical spelling acceptance on featured quizzes, they are of far, far better quality than the bulk of the unwashed masses of non-featured quizzes.
I still really like combing through the rubble and supporting people who put in the time. JetPunk users' quizzes, whether featured are not, are a great learning tool that have helped trig travel memories and opened up some new history to me.
One more major downside of the effluence in the new user quizzes is that it obviously pushes out the worthwhile quizzes from the first page where they are most likely to be seen. Then they disappear quickly altogether from the new quiz section.