FriendCrib Mag
Taking Quizilla Quizzes and Posting the Results
Quizilla was a site full of personality quizzes made by its own users, and it launched in 2002. People posted their results everywhere until it closed in 2014.
Written by Natalie Brooks · 56k: ~1 min
Quizilla was a website where users wrote their own personality quizzes and anyone could take them, and it went online at the end of July 2002. The quizzes asked a handful of multiple choice questions and then told you which character, color, animal or band you were. People posted their results on blogs and profiles to show their friends, and many took dozens of quizzes in one night.
Quizilla later added fan fiction and poems, was bought by MTV Networks in 2006 and closed on October 1, 2014.
A site made by its users
Quizilla was started by a programmer named Matthew Nielsen, who announced it in August 2002. The big idea was that the users made the quizzes. Anyone could sign up, write some questions, add answers and write the results.
That meant there were quizzes about everything. Which anime character are you? What kind of cake are you? Some quizzes were thoughtful and fun. Others were obviously written in 15 minutes during study hall, with three questions and a result that didn't match any of them.
It grew quickly. By 2003, Quizilla had more than 330,000 users and over 9 million page loads a day.
How did online personality quizzes work?
Online personality quizzes worked by giving each answer a hidden score toward one of the possible results. You answered questions like "What's your favorite season?" or "Pick a drink," and each choice secretly added points to a character or type. At the end, the quiz showed whichever result had the most points, usually with a picture and a short description.
The results weren't science, and nobody thought they were. The fun was in seeing if the quiz got you right, then making your friends take it too so you could compare. A quiz that guessed wrong about you was almost as fun to talk about as one that guessed right.
If the result was wrong, you took it again and changed a few answers. Everyone did that. You knew exactly which answer would make you Gryffindor instead of Hufflepuff.
Posting the results
Getting your result was only half of it, much like picking the words for an away message. The other half was showing it off. Quiz results often came with a picture and a short block of text that people copied onto their journals and pages. Friends would see your result, take the quiz themselves and post theirs, which kept quizzes moving from page to page.
That habit fit right in with Xanga and LiveJournal, where people already shared surveys and memes. Some journals had more quiz results than actual posts. It also fit with MySpace, where bulletins and surveys did the same job of telling everyone a little more about you.
Personality quizzes and other corners of the early 2000s internet. Watch on YouTube
Fan fiction and poems
Quizilla didn't stay just about quizzes. Users started posting chapters of fan fiction, and the site added more features over time, including poems, tags, themes, polls and a message board. Fan fiction written in second person, where "you" were part of the plot, was especially popular there, partly because other big fan fiction sites didn't allow it.
For a lot of young writers, Quizilla was the first place they shared something they wrote and got comments from strangers. The quizzes brought people in, and the writing kept some of them there for years. Quizzes also fed the same urge as a Top 8: telling friends who you are.
The pencil monster and the new features
Early Quizilla had a mascot called Penny the Pencil Monster, a little cartoon in the logo. She stayed until a redesign in May 2008. Along the way, the site kept adding things. Poems and an astrology section arrived in October 2005, tags came that December, themes in January 2006 and polls the month after.
Each new feature brought in a different crowd. Some people only ever took quizzes. Others came for the fan fiction and never touched a quiz at all. The site had become a little town of its own.
The quiz idea lives on
Quizzes like these never really went away. Years later, Facebook apps and big websites ran the same kind of "Which one are you?" quiz, and people shared the results just like they did in 2003. The questions got slicker, but the urge to find out which sandwich you are hasn't changed.
Who owned Quizilla?
Quizilla changed hands a couple of times. It was sold in 2005, and in October 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks announced it had bought the site. After that, the site became more family friendly, and a lot of older content was removed. Later on, links even started pointing toward TeenNick, the Nickelodeon channel.
The changes weren't always popular. In August 2010, a sudden shutdown wiped out many accounts. In November 2011, a lot of older work went missing for nearly two weeks, and fans still call it the Great Fall of Quizilla.
When did Quizilla shut down?
Quizilla shut down on October 1, 2014. Earlier that year, a bug in the site's security check kept people from publishing for months. In September 2014, a message went up saying the site would close at the start of October, and it did, mostly because fewer people were using it. A lot of quizzes and fan fiction disappeared with it, though fans saved some of them.
Things people remember
- The quiz that said you were the villain no matter what you picked
- Taking the same quiz three times to get a better answer
- Quiz results lined up down a journal sidebar
- Making your own quiz with only two possible results
- Being told you were a color and accepting it as fact
- Finding a quiz that knew you a little too well
Quizzes on FriendCrib
FriendCrib has its own quizzes at the quizzes page, with questions about old internet life and results you can post right on your crib. Visitors can take them without signing up, but you need a crib to post your result. Make one and find out what kind of crib you are.
You are visitor # 00330000
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