A former HQ Trivia host said there was a "toxic environment" at work where hosts were often pitted against each other
- Sarah Pribis was a former host of HQ Trivia, the now-defunct mobile trivia app.
- A new documentary about the viral game is coming to CNN, which Pribis said excluded her story.
A former host of the now-defunct mobile game HQ Trivia is speaking out about the "toxic environment" that flourished amid the app's meteoric rise in the late 2010s and its subsequent crash by 2020.
In a TikTok she shared on Wednesday, Sarah Pribis alleged that hosts were often pitted against each other and she was ghosted by the company for eight months without much explanation at the time.
"I can't say that it was more or less toxic than any other tech startup or entertainment job that I've had," she told Insider on Friday. "I had a lot of fun there, but there were some parts that were really difficult for me."
Sarah Pribis was the second host hired by the company, which was first launched by the founders of Vine in 2017. HQ Trivia bestowed real prize money to players during live-streamed trivia games. Pribis served as a substitute in the absence of its primary host, Scott Rogowsky.
While Rogowsky will headline "Glitch," a new CNN documentary about the company's demise, which will include details about the sudden death of cofounder Colin Kroll, Pribis told Insider she was only contacted for fact-checking purposes after the film was shot.
A source close to the film tells Insider that Sarah was contacted during production and conducted a pre-interview off-camera.
But since she won't be featured, Pribis said, she's turning to TikTok to share her story. Pribis is planning to roll out vlogs about her experience, but assures fans that she's not looking to smear any of her former colleagues.
Everyone felt replaceable, Pribis said, and that anxiety trickled down from the top
Pribis remembers a competitive tension among the game's fleet of hosts that trickled down from leadership struggles at the top of the company, she said on TikTok. (Kroll and cofounder Rus Yusupov both reportedly vied for the CEO role). Pribis said the company once had shared a poll on Twitter that asked people to vote between her and another woman host.
While she and Rogowsky only met a handful of times in person, commenters would repeatedly pit the two against one another in the comment section of live games. Pribis said it felt very much like "bullying."
She also encountered sexism on the job. Once, after she wore a tie and a shirt on air, a higher-up texted her to "never wear that again," she recounted on TikTok. "I think he didn't like that it wasn't a dress, but he wasn't able to articulate that to me."
Getting inexplicably ghosted by the company turned out to be a blessing
The coup de grace came when Pribis was suddenly ghosted after roughly a year and a half at the company — only to be rehired eight months later without explanation. Pribis told Insider she plans to share that story in a future vlog, and hinted that the issue stemmed from one person at the company in particular.
"I'm still going back and forth on whether or not I'm gonna name this person," she said. "I don't want their mental health to suffer so much because of something. However, I do think people should be accountable for their actions."
And while she felt "destroyed" after the game inexplicably dropped her, Pribis said she's ultimately grateful that it happened.
"It forced me to move on to other projects," she said. "And when I finally did go back to HQ, it enabled me to have a lot more fun because I'd already lost [the opportunity] – so I wasn't so focused on losing it again."
Today, Pribis is focusing her time on growing her personal TikTok brand, where she has 127,000 followers, and where she also shares her journey as a former addict and aspiring actor.