The JetPunk Iceberg Explained
First published: Sunday August 7th, 2022
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This is the JetPunk iceberg.
In case you don't know: An iceberg chart is a chart with several entries, all about the same topic. In the style of an iceberg, the visible top consists of more well-known things, but the deeper beneath the surface you go, the more obscure and unknown the entries get.
This iceberg is about JetPunk. I will be talking about the site itself and its different elements, history and community.
- Brace yourselves: with over 36k characters, this blog is very long.
- There are a lot of entries I could've included, but decided against it, since they are so well-known and not that interesting. It would've made the top layers way too saturated.
- I've tried to explain the entries the best I could whilst also not trying to make this too long. If you have additional questions, feel free to ask.
The JetPunk Iceberg Explained
Layer 1
Quizmaster, or QM, or Dan Hostetler is the creator and moderator of JetPunk. We all know and love him, he's JetPunk's Benevolent Dictator and has ruled the site since the beginning.
"Countries of the World Quiz" (or COTW) is easily the most popular quiz on the site with over 22 million takes. It also has countless copies and is most likely the first JetPunk quiz you ever played. That's about it.
Stewart is a JetPunk user and admin. Since 2016, he's provided us with incredible quizzes, integral features and is responsible of taking care of the site along with the Quizmaster.
In JetPunk, you can collect badges by playing specific quizzes. There are currently 31 badges, and they have been a thing since November 2016. If you're interested in learning more about these fun, little collectibles, read this blog by Stewart.
This Mediterranean island country is probably the most controversial country in JetPunk. Since JetPunk (or Quizmaster) considers it Asian, as opposed to European, it has been the subject of heated debates for years and has kind of achieved a meme status in this site, similar to Belgium.
We all know kalbahamut. He's arguably influenced JetPunk commenting more than anyone else. Everyone has seen his opinions and water-proof arguments in his countless snarky debates in JetPunk comment sections. He has written more comments than anyone else in the site. Kind of a legend in his own right.
Spotlights are a feature introduced in March 2021. JetPunkers that have been kicking around for over six months and with a total level of at least 50 can spotlight any quiz they want. This quiz will show up at the front page and is a neat way to get the community involved in getting good quizzes the attention they deserve.
H Brothers Inc. is the company that owns JetPunk. It was founded by brothers Dan (or Quizmaster) and John Hostetler. It is based in Seattle or Ann Arbor, depending on which source you believe.
JetPunk isn't limited to English. There are eight featured languages in total, and all of them have their own main page, featured quizzes and separate levels. It's also the reason I have so many featured quizzes. Additionally, there are 14 side-languages, if you will, that you can select when creating content.
JetPunk started out as a traveling website. You could search up cheap plane routes with a great search engine, or so I'm told. Quizzes came to be in around 2008, and by 2011 (I think?), JetPunk became exclusively a quiz website. The legacy of JetPunk's history still lives on in the name of the website, "Jet" referring to traveling. Click here if you want to see what JetPunk used to look like in its primitive days.
Layer 2
This is a joke that's been a thing for years. Users complain or joke about quizzes, or the site in general, as being too centered and focused around the United States. There is a point: It's easily the country with the most featured English quizzes about it to a point where it can get overwhelming or even unfair to lesser-known countries. Then again, JetPunk is a U.S.-based website with an American owner and a large chunk of the traffic coming from the U.S., so the focus on the U.S. makes sense. I personally don't see it as much more than a running joke.
JetPunk uses urban area in a majority of its quizzes when measuring the population of cities. The most notable example of this is Guangzhou, China being the world's largest city instead of more well-known Tokyo that a lot of sources claim is the most populated city. It's interesting how much the populations of different cities change depending on how you decide to calculate the population. This simply is something JetPunk prefers to use. If you're interested in learning more about measuring city populations, read this blog by Jeremy/CringeDragon.
When you hover over a user's name, it displays a little information pop-up, showing things such as their Quizmaker rank and the amount of years their account has existed. If the user is a JetPunk Premium member, it will also display the orange smiley face, just like in their names. And if the account is affiliated with the Quizmaster, it will display Jeppy, JetPunk's green fish mascot. It's a fairly fun quirk that not everyone might've known. Fun fact: The account danhostetler is both a JetPunk Premium member and has Jeppy in its name.
You can speedrun JetPunk quizzes. The verified world record in the COTW Quiz is 2 minutes and 5 seconds by a user named coronavirus. The swiftest typers are really impressive and it goes to show that just knowing all countries isn't enough for some.
JetPunk has a presence in different social media sites. There are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, a subreddit and a Discord server. While JetPunk's presence in Facebook and Twitter is fairly dead, the Discord server is thriving. If you want to, I'd recommend you to join. It's a decent place.
The Quizmaster has a lot of alt accounts. You can tell an account is his or is affiliated with him in some way when it has no user rank and has Jeppy in its name. There are separate accounts for quizzes in different languages and quizzes about specific topics. Since several quizzes weren't technically owned by anyone until the Quizmaster account kind of came to be in 2016, these were used by the Quizmaster to make his own quizzes about different specific subjects.
JetPunk is committed to donating a percentage of their revenue to planting trees. It's one of the first things you learn when visiting the main page.
Since January 2021, you could be friends with people in JetPunk. This allows for you to see your friends' high scores on quizzes and their private quizzes. Additionally, you can create groups in which you can talk with people you've requested to join. It's about the closest JetPunk gets to being a "social media site", something the Quizmaster has stated isn't something he'd want.
There are quite a lot of videos of people playing JetPunk in YouTube and TikTok. Some have over a million views and have helped the website get a lot of traffic. The popularity of French and Polish in JetPunk has been credited to content creators showcasing the website.
There's a quiz about every country on JetPunk. It was a campaign that started in July 2, 2020 with China Country Quiz appearing on the front page, and it continued until January 15, 2021. Have you earned the badge yet?
Inspired by this series, there are also featured quizzes about different regions, including U.S. states, states of Germany and regions of Netherlands.
Since English is easily the most popular language in JetPunk, it's obvious there are some features limited to it. These include nominations, spotlights, tags, and five quizzes in the front page per day. However, mainly thanks to work put in by the French community, the French section has some things implemented from the English section, such as a spotlight system and Interesting Facts.
Layer 3
There are "official", featured JetPunk blogs created by Quizmaster, Stewart, or at times, some users. There are also some "spotlighted" blogs that have appeared on the front page.
JetPunk's website relies on Amazon web hosting. Not that much more to it, it's an interesting fact you might've not known.
Does JetPunk have some political opinions that make the site less objective than ideal? The most obvious example is the fact that Taiwan and Kosovo are considered independent countries on the site, but Palestine isn't. I suppose you could argue these things make JetPunk politically biased and they are Dan's personal political opinions that have made their way to JetPunk.
Subdivision quizzes are quizzes about countries' administrative regions, with maps. There was a community project that was about creating a quiz about every country's first-level subdivision which was completed in June 2021. Also, there's currently a not-so active project about doing the same thing with second-level subdivisions. You can find these quizzes in this spreadsheet.
Will there be a JetPunk app? It's something that's been asked a lot. Here's what Stewart has said:
Basically, it would require an amount of work and money that would be impossible for JetPunk just to achieve something that the mobile website does perfectly fine.
JetPunk has some special themes during seasonal events. From Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve, there are six quizzes on the front page per day instead of five. There are April Fools' Day, Christmas, and Halloween-themed quizzes which usually make their way to the front page on that particular day. In 2022, there has been a quiz every day celebrating some type of day, dubbed "Every day's a holiday". And, in Christmas 2021, Jeppy wore a stocking cap.
There are countless quizzes that have been defeatured, or even deleted, over the years. You can find some of them on QM's alt accounts, especially formerfrontpage, or by exploring the Wayback Machine where you're certain to find some since-deleted or defeatured quizzes.
There are hidden messages in JetPunk Word Searches. When completing a Word Search, the letters that weren't used form a word. It's a fun secret, courtesy of Stewart. In June 2022, the hidden message was a mysterious code, created as a challenge for JetPunk users to crack. You can read more about it in this blog.
JetPunk started to use SVGs as maps in quizzes in the end of 2015. But where did these maps come from? Naturalearthdata.com. And in case you're wondering, the projection for the maps is the equirectangular projection, stretched out.
Layer 4
The "Countries of the World" Quiz has been translated to over 50 languages. 8 of these versions are translated to featured languages, thus playing them can get you points. But there are three interesting cases of featured quizzes that you can't earn points from: Danish, Serbian and Arabic.
Why? What's the point of featuring a quiz made in a non-featured language that doesn't exactly benefit from its feature? The Danish one can be explained by the fact that it's made by the QM. It would be kind of weird to have a quiz not featured in Quizmaster's account. I can't think of a reason why the Arabic and Serbian ones are featured, they don't even have notably large amounts of plays. Could this have something to do with Kosovo and Palestine? It's a pretty interesting little JetPunk fact.
Even before the spotlight system was created, some quizzes were "spotlighted", meaning they appeared on the main page in an info box. This was a way for the Quizmaster to give recognition to good quizzes that just weren't feature-worthy. You get the idea by going to this link and scrolling down the page.
There are a number of NSFW (...or inappropriate) quizzes on JetPunk for some reason. Some have been deleted or hidden, some persist on the site. Even Quizmaster's made one of them. I suppose people like quizzes about inappropriate subjects, considering some of them have thousands of plays.
kimad is a user who currently has a #520 Quizmaker rank, 94 quizzes and has been in JetPunk since at least 2015. What's so special about this account? Well, it has a total ranking of 132, being the highest-ranked account on JetPunk. Achieving that ranking would've required an insane amount of quiz grinding, and it definitely is a notable achievement.
This is a relatively low-hanging fruit. The domain JetPunk.com has been owned by the H Brothers since 2008 (or 2006? Conflicting information exists), but by using the Wayback Machine you can see there are saves that go way back to 2004. There's this from 2005, which is owned by a domain provider GoDaddy.com. The first snippet found of the URL is this one, from July 6, 2004. Apparently it's a site builder, and very bare-bones judging by the way it looks.
What's really odd is the fact that upon clicking on a dead image you're transferred to this site. It's a site called Web Gems Hosting, a company that apparently still exists. I wouldn't call this especially mysterious, considering these things don't really have anything to do with the JetPunk we know, but it is pretty interesting and at least gives you a look on what our favorite website looked like in the more primitive times of the internet. I'll be looking more into some of these things the further down we go.
This entry means that there are quizzes on JetPunk which are impossible to play properly, due to technical limitations. There are some quizzes that have so many answers that it's not possible to save your results, thus leading to them having 0 plays. An example is Vicky's 10,000 Biggest U.S. Cities on a Map. There's a maximum limit of 10 000 answers you can add, but before this limit came to be, HinesBrothers created the ALL 10,300 U.S. Cities with at Least 1,000 People Quiz, making it the largest quiz on JetPunk and equally impossible to play.
This wasn't exactly a "controversy", just a mildly interesting thing that happened. When Finnish became a featured language in 2019, user Penguinish helped translate the site and a massive amount of quizzes into Finnish. However, a number of translated quizzes she made were already made years ago by user skukka. This was something skukka expressed dissatisfaction with and blamed the translators of not properly looking for already existing quizzes. I suppose they have a point, though some translations weren't always the best and just translating an existing quiz doesn't make it exclusively yours. That's really about it, an incident that happened once.
I mentioned GoDaddy.com a couple of entries ago. This company, from what I can tell, sells/sold website building and domain names. That's why the jetpunk.com domain was once owned by the company and why an old JetPunk archive displays a GoDaddy site. It's the registrar of the website, and the license will apparently expire in 2027.
At the end of 2015, JetPunk started to use SVG files as maps. Before that, they were image files. As they naturally didn't have the properties maps have nowadays, zoom-clicking and turning the guessed answers green weren't a thing. SVGs became a thing, then users were allowed to create their own map quizzes, and the rest is history.
Layer 5
This is something Stewart revealed in Poirot's interview. In September 4, 2018, a schoolkid used a script that managed to get the "Name the Planets" quiz over 20 000 takes in a single day.
Is it possible, in any way, to beat JetPunk? It's not a game, nor is there a specific goal. This is something you can choose for yourself. Is it achieving every badge there is? Or getting the highest level possible? Or playing every single quiz? You can certainly master JetPunk, but is beating it plausible?
This is a domain you're redirected to when visiting a jetpunk.com save from 2010. It's a traveling blog containing stories about trips to foreign countries, written by John (John Hostetler) and "admin" (could this be QM? It's possible). You can read the blog here.
In 2012, the website turned into a vacation photo gallery. I'm not sure whether John still owned the URL, but it's very plausible. Then it turned into... a quizzing website. Just like JetPunk. Those vacation photos could still be found on the site when quizzes started to appear, meaning that John Hostetler might've created his own quizzing website. This is all speculation, as I don't know how the ownership of the URL has changed over the years. Currently, it's a quizzing website, which makes its and JetPunk's shared history pretty interesting.
Yes, this is a joke entry. This is a quiz that actually existed in JetPunk. It sort of became a joke on the Discord server, thanks to it being so funny, indiscreet, questionable and hard to take seriously. It's exactly what the name suggests; a list of random celebrities with large behinds. Sadly, it was deleted in February 2022, very likely due to it being spotlighted. Apparently the QM didn't like that a quiz like that showed up on the JetPunk main page. Thankfully, this piece of history can still be viewed through an archive in the Wayback Machine.
There are, or at least were odd websites that plagiarized JetPunk quizzes. They displayed links to quizzes and were essentially attempts to get page views through people searching up JetPunk quizzes. A sort of similar case was an incident in 2020 in which some Sporcle users directly stole quizzes from JetPunk and got large amounts of takes and credit for "their" work. Thankfully, Stewart got in contact with someone from Sporcle and these quizzes were deleted.
A smaller unknown fact: At one point, you were able to put spaces in your JetPunk account's name. Examples are Opt Student and Joe Lajszczuk. And one of the most popular quizmakers, LBA, used to be known as Luke Allan.
Adding spaces to usernames was allowed until September 10, 2012. I know the exact date because I managed to find an announcement in the main page through an archive. If I had to guess, it was very likely done due to the problems spaces could cause, regarding URL maintenance and data saving.
There apparently was a beta quiz creator for a very short while in April 2012, proven by a JetPunk web archive. There are no sources that could tell what it looked like and how it functioned. It's a bit weird how this was advertised in 2012, considering user-created quizzes were a thing back in 2011.
Quiz Ideas Page was a way for the community to give ideas for quizzes. It existed in between 2010-2013 and several quizzes were created thanks to it. If you're interested, give it a read. It's a really insightful way to look at JetPunk's community and interactions in the sites early days. It was likely discontinued because users were allowed to make their own quizzes and get those featured at that point, and it was fairly redundant in a lot of ways. An interesting fact is that there are quiz ideas submitted over 10 years ago that still haven't been made into a quiz by anyone. That's sad.
We know for certain that the oldest user-created quiz that still exists in JetPunk is scorp1970's Regions of Italy quiz, submitted way back in December 21, 2011. But until 2022, the oldest quiz created by someone not affiliated with the QM was AndrewIsGreen's Video Games and Characters, submitted in November 23, 2011, pre-dating scorp's quiz by over a month! Sadly, the quiz and Andrew's account were deleted at one point in 2022.
JetPunk quizzes have been a thing since 2009, with one exception. There's a quiz that was apparently created in December 31, 1969.
How is this possible? The explanation is a little thing called Unix epoch. Basically, when this system was launched, a way to calculate time was needed. This time was started in January 1st, 1970, and it's still used in computers and the internet. Sometimes this bugs and some things show up as being created way back in the start of this calculated time. Why is the quiz made in 1969, not 1970, then? It comes down to time zones. I can't explain this that well, so I'd recommend you to watch this video by Tom Scott, if you want a more in-depth answer. Anyway, the Quizmaster apparently fixed the bug in the quiz and now it can only be viewed through archives with my good friend, the Wayback Machine.
Layer 6
JetPunk has a green fish in its logo, and the Quizmaster has said that he's not sure where it came from. The community has named him "Jeppy", deriving from the site's name, but he was actually originally called Ike. This is what Quizmaster said:
"I'm not really sure where the fish came from. His birth name is Ike, but it sounds like he is going by Jeppy now so I will respect his wishes since he is nearly a teenager at this point"
"Extreme Animals?" was a comment thread from 2010 that existed once. This was created by the QM in an attempt to find suggestions for his quiz about record-breaking animals. I'm not 100% sure, but this quiz was apparently never released. Additionally, there also was a comment thread that was asking for questions for General Knowledge Quizzes.
Facebook Friday was an event that was a thing back in 2012. In short, a link to a "hidden" quiz would be posted to the JetPunk Facebook every Friday, obviously in an attempt to promote the Facebook page and give its followers some extra content.
If I had to guess, these quizzes weren't really hidden, they just weren't displayed in JetPunk's main page. It was a thing for a while in 2012 and apparently wasn't massively popular. You can find these hidden quizzes by diving into the JetPunk Facebook page.
Before JetPunk, the H Brothers had another website called AirNinja. It was what JetPunk originally was: a site where you could search cheap plane flights. Exploring through archives reveals that the domain was owned by the H Brothers until 2019, albeit the search engine had been unusable since 2012. Since then, the domain has been used for fairly random things (if you're interested, just scrounge through the old archives) and now redirects me to a book store ad.
Additionally, I managed to find a news article from 2012 where John and Dan Hostetler were interviewed about their website. It's revealed that they created a site called mschedule.com way back in 2003! It's very intriguing to think how long the H Brothers have been creating websites and this rabbit hole is surprisingly deep.
Remember when I said how AndrewIsGreen's quiz was the first user-created quiz on JetPunk until 2022? Well...
By digging through the Wayback Machine, it's revealed that the first-ever quiz created by a user on JetPunk was james33's Michigan Quarterbacks since 1990. It was published way back in November 18, 2011, pre-dating Andrew's quiz by five days. Sadly, the james33 account has been deleted along with the quiz and the evidence for this can only be found through archives.
No, this isn't a joke entry. There are ways you could turn a quiz illegal. Displaying copyrighted material in your quiz could lead to someone suing JetPunk. Cases like this have happened, although they've been deleted before anything has happened. You could theoretically also display images or links of very illegal things. Who's to say that there isn't or hasn't existed a perhaps hidden quiz which displayed something that probably shouldn't be in JetPunk?
The first ever JetPunk blog was created way back in 2012. In it, the Quizmaster talks about Facebook Friday and how the event isn't worth it. You can read it here. I have no idea how I managed to find this, but it existed, and several years before the "first" JetPunk blogs.
I'll admit, this doesn't have that much to do with JetPunk, but it's still worthy of getting here. If you visit jetpunk.com archives in the Wayback Machine, you'll find a save from 2004 that looks like this.
That's the whole website. An announcement to a movie(?) with a dead link to "Dano in action". Searching up "For the Record" doesn't bring up anything. Looking at the site with Inspect Element reveals nothing. This is a lost media case. There's really nothing I know about whatever they were filming, if I had to guess, it seems like some small indie film or documentary being made by a group of friends. The fact that it was actually being filmed hints that some footage or information might be found somewhere, even if it was never released (considering there's nothing I can find, this could very well be the case). And yes, the JetPunk we know today has nothing to do with this, nonetheless, it's an intriguing case of lost media.
This is a rather depressing thing to think about. JetPunk won't be a thing forever. It could be caused by things like not being profitable enough or a lack of interest in keeping the site running. I'm sure Dan would like to keep the site kicking for as long as possible, and he could always transfer the ownership to someone or something, would anything happen. This is all speculation about something that won't happen in a long time, or even never, but the fact is that one day, JetPunk might not be a thing. One day, you will play your last JetPunk quiz.
Final Thoughts
That's the JetPunk iceberg explained in great detail. If you managed to read through all of this, then congratulations, you really are interested in JetPunk. I had fun while researching and writing this blog, and I hope I didn't uncover some big secrets that people shouldn't know about. Are there any things I should've included in here? Did you learn something new? Did you have fun reading this? I hope you did. Thanks for your time, everyone.
Now someone just needs to add creepy music and record it as a 40 minute video lol
I've only been on this sight for a year and a half now hence why I haven't heard of these older pieces of history so it was nice to learn about that as well :)
NOOO JETPUNK SHALL LAST FOREVER!!!!!!Nice blog!
2 is his brother John, and 3 is JetPunk's first known user from what I can tell, prattr (https://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/3).
About For the Record — I may have a lead somewhere (just maybe). I really want to know what it is.