The Greatest App of All Time Day 14: VSCO vs. HQ Trivia

Thursday, 14 March 2024

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Graphic: Gizmodo

It’s Day 12 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time and the people have spoken. Google Earth dominated in yesterday’s poll with more than 76 percent of the vote. Pandora is out! Today, our only photo-editing contestant takes on an app that was in a league of its own.

If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Check out the full bracket of contestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.

I’m going to be honest with you. VSCO is a major underdog in this contest. But we just thought our bracket wouldn’t be complete without at least one photo-editing app and as far as that category goes, VSCO has punched above its weight.

The app itself is simple enough. It provides filters and presets for photos and videos that have been around since the Hipstamatic days. But what sets VSCO apart is its viral cultural impact. That is to say, it introduced the world to the VSCO girl. What’s a VSCO girl you ask? Here’s a 5,000-word explainer. Want to skip all that and just take my word for it? I guess a VSCO girl is kind of a basic girl with a vaguely California aesthetic who likes to buy a certain set of products. This was all big on TikTok and it’s a slightly horrifying look at the state of our current consumer culture. A VSCO girl is kind of what TikTok and Instagram would like everyone to be: predictable and primarily interested in products.

Taking on VSCO, we have an app that briefly took over the world and flamed out as quickly as it came. HQ Trivia dragged the game show into the modern world when it launched in 2017. While everyone was trying to use the internet to give people the option to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, HQ Trivia brought people together and gave them an appointment.

Every night at 9 PM, you could open the app and participate in a trivia contest with cash prizes going as high as $400,000. The questions became increasingly difficult and if you got one wrong you were out. It was fun. It was a phenomenon. Its most popular host, Scott “Trivia Daddy” Rogowsky became a minor celebrity until his departure in 2019. And the app just steadily died off without him. It never officially shut down, it just stopped doing shows. No hard feelings, it was good while it lasted.

So, reader, what’ll it be? Has the cultural impact of VSCO been enough to send it to the next round or should HQ Trivia be the winner of our little game?