Hello! Happy Saturday. The last couple of posts on here went spelunking into the history of the word “trivia” and the murky origins of the pub quiz, and I had a great time pretending to be a historian for an afternoon. Today I want to do something different and just… talk about the thing itself. This site. What it is, where it’s going, and why it’s called what it’s called — because there’s a story there, and it involves my boss.
So, hi. I’m Christian. I built Trivialism.
Trivialism is a multiplayer trivia platform. The short version: you and your mates jump into a game, questions come at you, you race to answer them, and someone gets to be insufferable about winning for the rest of the night. That’s the whole pitch, really.
The slightly longer version — the stuff that’s actually live right now:
Here’s the one I keep telling people about whether they asked or not: there’s a Discord trivia bot. A lot of friend groups already live in a Discord server, so instead of dragging everyone off to a website, I brought the game to them. You add the bot, fire off a slash command, and you’re running live trivia rounds right there in the channel — same questions, same engine, same scoring as the web game.
It shares its core with the website (it’s all one C++ brain under the hood), so when I fix something in one place it lands in both. It’s in beta and a little rough at the edges, but it works, and watching a server light up mid-round is honestly one of my favourite things I’ve made.
The big next thing is native mobile apps — iOS and Android. They exist right now, in internal beta, and I’m putting them through real games daily to find all the ways a phone on bad reception can ruin your evening. A browser tab is fine; an app you can open in two seconds on the sofa is better. When they’re ready, they’re ready — I’d rather ship them a bit late than ship something that feels like a website wearing a trenchcoat.
In the meantime, the web game is right here and very much playable: so if you’re reading this, go play a few, drag your most competitive friend into a game, and start an argument over a capital city. Trivia is no fun alone — the whole thing comes alive when the room fills up, and right now you filling the room is the single most useful thing that can happen to this project.
Okay, the story I promised. This site used to be called The Digital Local. I loved it. Your local pub’s quiz night, minus the geography — it said exactly what I wanted it to say.
And then my boss at my actual, pays-the-rent day job took one look and gently explained that, from an SEO point of view, “The Digital Local” was a bit of a disaster — fighting for search results with every local newspaper and local business on the internet, and basically impossible to find. So I was, lovingly, made to change it.
I grumbled. Then I renamed it Trivialism, and then — as I got into in the trivia etymology post — I discovered that “trivial” originally meant “of the crossroads,” the busy public place where everyone meets. Which is, completely by accident, the most perfect name I could have landed on. So: thanks, boss. The old name isn’t fully gone, mind you — the previous web address still redirects to trivialism.com, like a little ghost of the pub I set out to build.
I should be upfront about something. For now, this is a one-man team. It’s me. The C++ engine, the website, the Discord bot, the questions, the mobile apps, these blog posts — all one person, mostly evenings and weekends.
This particular version of Trivialism is about three months old. But honestly? It’s more like three years. This is the thing all the false starts were quietly building toward — the abandoned experiments, an earlier Discord bot, a dozen half-finished prototypes that each taught me one thing I needed and then got scrapped. None of that was wasted. It was all the run-up. This is the version I’m not walking away from.
I’m not saying that for sympathy points (okay — maybe a couple). I’m saying it because it changes how you should read everything above. When something’s a bit rough, or a feature’s missing, or a question has a dodgy answer, it isn’t a faceless company that doesn’t care. It’s one person who hasn’t gotten to it yet.
Genuinely — please give me feedback. If something’s broken, confusing, annoying, or just not as fun as it should be, I want to know. There’s a flag button in-game for dodgy questions, there’s a Discord where you can yell at me directly, and you can always email. A one-person project lives and dies on whether the people using it bother to tell the person what’s wrong. You are, functionally, my entire QA department, and I appreciate you for it more than you know.
Let me just say the ambitious thing out loud, because I think you should hear it: I want Trivialism to be the best place to play multiplayer trivia on the internet. Full stop. Not “one of the good ones.” The best.
That’s a faintly ridiculous goal for one person and I’m aware of it. But every quiz night I’ve ever loved was just a room full of people pooling the random things they each happen to know and having a brilliant time doing it. That’s the whole magic, and there’s no reason it can’t live online, on your phone, and in your Discord server — done properly, without the slop.
I’ve been circling this idea for years. Everything I’ve ever built and binned was practice for it. So I’m going to say the embarrassingly earnest thing and mean it: this is the magnum opus of trivia. Or it will be, by the time I’m done. I’m going to keep chipping away until it’s undeniable.
Thanks for being here this early — genuinely, the people who show up before a thing is finished are the ones who get to say they were there. Now go play the Quiz of the Day, and then come tell me what I got wrong.
