Show HN: Throw – A space for asking and answering questions anonymously (trythrow.com)
For the past two years we’ve been working on this disruptive new thing. It’s about people, community, communication and truth.
Throw is the new space for asking and answering questions anonymously. We believe that in today’s world (both online and offline) content in communication exchanges is strongly influenced by the personas, profiles and façades people maintain/upkeep/safeguard socially, ideologically and on relationships.
From the way people post on Instagram the life they want others to believe they have, or the way people behave on thanksgiving with family, or at work, or with friends; on every social setting and interaction to some degree acting and behaving according to that setting and the people they interact with. These dynamics influence the content itself, as people don’t just respond to a question like computers do. What ends up happening is that the responder comes up with the answer by blending the possibly objective answer with feelings, setting, desires, commitments, ideologies, fears, insecurities, etc (social pressure or social agenda).
Something is missing between social media and the traditional Q&A…
Throw addresses this by creating a space free from this social agenda. Thus focusing strictly on the content exchanged and providing a safe, comfortable and unbiased space where people can ask and answer anything freely with no bias, fears or strings attached.
We've put key components of social media, Q&A and surveying industries into one platform.
Not only may Throw be used for personal and private questions and answers. But the power of crowdsourcing allows for a great variety of use cases like market research, validation of content and ideas, trivia, and much more. Serious matters and also just for fun…
It’s a query marketplace which means that “throwers” (people who ask questions) pay a fee proportional to the answers they need and in turn “catchers” (who catch them and respond) get compensated. This way we guarantee every user gets as many responses as he/she needs.
As for dealing with anonymity, we have built a sophisticated moderation protocol to neutralize and quickly ban people that contribute negatively as it is a priority people feel safe and comfortable in this community.
We have worked very hard to create a delightful product and are basically launching today!
If this is something that may be of your interest or you’d like to be one of the first to test it out download our app and play around with it. https://www.trythrow.com
Also, if you have questions there is additional information in the FAQs section on our web page that could be of help.
Finally, we really appreciate any feedback we can get (of any kind). So if there's anything you like, don't like, or any other thought about Throw, we'd love to hear about it! You may post a comment below or through the contact section on the web page.
Be curious and dare to know!
Thank you!
62 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadHaving to install an app is always a bad user experience. It's a dealbreaker for me for just about every case, and in general it's got to add a lot of friction when you're trying to get people to sign up.
It would be interesting to hear some honest discussion of the tradeoffs. I assume most companies prefer me using an app because it lets them run arbitrary code on my phone, access contacts and whatnot, and send me notifications. Is it also materially easier to write the code for apps? Is that a legit reason why companies prefer it? And is whatever companies are getting out of forcing their users onto an app worth the potential users they lose because of it?
No idea if you're building your app in a web framework that ports to mobile easily, or what your choices are around that, but I'd highly recommend reconsidering not having a web app if it's at all reasonable for your time table.
For me? I hate typing on my phone, so I probably would pass on this until a web app is supported.
Web pages play video and have interactive components just fine.
How anonymous is anonymous? Are the employees at Throw able to see the questions I ask, since my Apple ID is associated with the app download and presumably my Throw account?
How do you defend against trolls? And how do you distinguish them from genuinely stupid people?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
What do you do with all the teenagers (?) asking "questions" about sex?
The way the platform is designed makes it hard to implement ChatGPT or other AI services (at least on an automated manner) because the person that asks the question selects the media format he wants the answers back. On top of this, each person that answers does not pick the questions he wants to answer, we do the matching. So one moment you're being asked to answer in text the next in voice and the next record a video. It's very human interactive.
As for filtering trolls and stupid people, you can upvote, downvote, and report 1)trash content or 2) offensive content. Our algorithm constantly takes all of this and many other metrics to determine the better performing people and filter out the opposite.
The way the moderation system works is the following:
Any user may report content as 1) trash content or 2) offensive content. A report immediately triggers a task that packages the reported question on a poll asking if the content is in fact what it has been tagged as. The poll is presented to other users in the platform to validate if the content is or not what it was tagged as. If it is, then the content is censored and the user faces consequences in his score up to eventually being banned. It is ok to give your point of view even if someone does not agree with it. That is not trash nor an offense. The purpose is to be able to be completely open and candid without being offensive.
Teenagers asking about sex... Well as long as its not offensive or disrespectful it is fair play. Even adults ask about sex and this is a place where you can do so comfortably and not be criticized.
IDK if this is part of your plans, it seems like a perfect way to gather LLM training data... And a reasonable use case for LLM integration. And its not in explicit conflict with your privacy policy as far as I can tell, as long as you self host.
Everyone is training LLaMA on ChatGPT Q+A pairs, but a big corpus of filtered, purely human, human rated questions+responses would be so much better.
This seems a firm stance against objective truth. Your scoring algorithm benefits answers that people want to receive, and you actively penalize truthful but disliked answers.
"I feel I am fat. What should I do?"
The truthful answer is something like diet modification, but the answer most likely to make someone feel safe and comfortable is "no, you're not fat".
Any user may report content as 1) trash content or 2) offensive content.
A report immediately triggers a task that packages the reported question on a poll asking if the content is in fact what it has been tagged as.
The poll is presented to other users in the platform to validate if the content is or not what it was tagged as.
If it is, then the content is censored and the user faces consequences in his score up to eventually being banned.
It is ok to give your point of view even if someone does not agree with it. That is not trash nor an offense.
The purpose is to be able to be completely open and candid without being offensive.
Hope this helps answer your question.
You might be correct if the assertion is the latter is more reflective of how an average Internet user actually feels at any given moment but won't admit in polite company.
Any user may report content as 1) trash content or 2) offensive content.
A report immediately triggers a task that packages the reported question on a poll asking if the content is in fact what it has been tagged as.
The poll is presented to other users in the platform to validate if the content is or not what it was tagged as.
If it is, then the content is censored and the user faces consequences in his score up to eventually being banned.
It is ok to give your point of view even if someone does not agree with it. That is not trash nor an offense.
The purpose is to be able to be completely open and candid without being offensive.
The "being open without being offensive" heavily depends on the eye of the beholder, and without consistent standards, there will be many arbitrary bans.
But you’re going to find it hard to get traction with it only being a native app. The magic of Stack Overflow, Quora, Reddit etc is people ask questions that are then indexed by search engines. This finds people who are knowledgeable on the topic because they’re researching something related, and it finds people asking questions about it that just asked google instead. The community comes to you.
(Over simplification of course, not everyone who answers on quora is an expert.)
Here, you’re betting on people opening your app, because they… just want to answer a question? A service like this lives or dies by how easy it is to find the people to do the free content work for you. You’ve made it a lot harder for them to do that.
And yes, we do plan to incorporate alternative infrastructure with less friction without having to download an app in the future.
Thank you so much for your kind words and wise point of view!
And your website privacy policy states:
> We collect your email address number when you provide it to us by signing up to use the Service.
> We collect your biographical information, such as your name, date of birth, gender and geographical location, when you set up your account on the Service.
edit:
The following also sticks out for me:
> We may also process your Personal Data because it is necessary for our or a third party's legitimate interests and it’s not overridden by your rights. In this respect, we may use your Personal Data to:
> To contact you via email, postal mail, or telephone to learn more about your preferences, to conduct market research and learn more about how we can improve our offerings.
Your, or third party's interest do not override a EU residents right. You need a distinct opt-in for the reasons listed (marketing, research, etc).
Certainly doesn’t feel anonymous
The rest of the demographic data like age, location, preferences, etc are used for users to be able to conduct segmented audience queries.
Example: I want to ask a parenting question, to women between 30 to 45 years of age on Chicago area...
By the way, we do not intend to sell data or rely on ads business model and this is why we opted to incorporate a more transparent "paid" service. So, the user data is safe and not going to be exploited like on many other social media platforms.
Hope this helps understand the purpose of the type of data collected.
This seems to be another platform trying to capitalize on the marketing gimmick of "privacy". It's become a very overloaded term. Apple's definition of privacy, is different from Google's, is different from Facebook's, is different from GrapheneOS', is different from...
It would be great if there was a privacy template that was recognized by a few, notable and trustworthy organizations. And that template would force the powers that be behind all of these "privacy oriented" sites and/or apps to be scrutinized in the same way, by a standard which would limit the definition gymnastics, at least a little. And that way said founders don't get to show up to forums and say "Well... By privacy we mean we're collecting all this information. And we have an open ended promise that's not protected in any way, shape or form - so while this is what we're telling you today, that may immediately go out the window when we're offered an undisclosed amount to sell all of the telemetry we weren't using to reverse engineer who you actually are".
For now.
A truly anonymous service would start by not needing apps, which are notoriously leaky, on purpose.
It’s not anonymous when you know where I live, my birthday, and gender. There is only one person that matches those three data points.
We actually don't mine personal information.
Ok, so you able to identify user as living in Chicago area, by sex, by age, by email, but you still do not collect name or any identity related personal information? What kind of magic is this? Age, sex, area of living, email is definitely PII.
>> By the way, we do not intend to sell data or rely on ads business model.... So, the user data is safe and not going to be exploited like on many other social media platforms.
Many other social media platforms made this promise too at the start. Is there any reason to believe you that this will not change in a year, or after successful acquisition by some big player? Can you put it into ToS?
Such a cute landing page and all this dance just to entice humans to provide more input to AI models to sell. It’s actually kind of disgusting when you think what the ultimate plan almost definitely is.
At a glance of the post and only a few seconds thought, I would guess the 'catchers' - the people who are being paid to answer the questions.
If they are being brought to the platform with the promise of regular work, building up a profile of expertise & reliability so they can generate more revenue on the platform, but under the hood their responses are just training LLMs so their work can be automated and they're eventually replaced by a catcher-bot trained on their responses... then I would argue they are losing in this situation, as they've invested time building up their profile only to risk having it stripped away.
It's a bit like building a cool new physical product and then going to a lot of effort to build a shopfront and presence on Amazon, only to have an AmazonBasics version of your product appear after a couple of months.
edit: not to say that this is what is happening with this site or that their intent is malicious! Just gaming out a potential case where there are some losers on the user side here.
Show HN: Throw – The new space for asking and answering questions anonymously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30801845 - March 2022 (47 comments)
I tried to download your app but it doesn't work. It says "not available for your device", but I have a brand name phone with the latest version of Android.
How do you know if your users are qualified to give that advice?
Secret sounded scandalous, and maybe that was the goal, but it actually did a really great job of anonymous Q&A, and was full of posts from people saying "I have this private/odd/embarrassing situation what should I do", and more often then not the thread contained some really insightful and thoughtful stuff.
I was disappointed when it shut down, is the idea of this to be similar?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_(app)
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just thought it was a web site.
Seems very broad and general. The beauty of Reddit is going into subreddit's and asking a question to a specific community. Reddit is also fairly anonymous too.
I understand that this is a commercial platform, but when cash is introduced to a Q/A system... incentives are misaligned.
It seems communities without monetary gain (Hacker News, Reddit etc...), have very little incentive to lie...