Show HN: Throw – A space for asking and answering questions anonymously

[luisamodio]

Hello HN community,

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!

[mhitza]

Per your Android application data collection possibilities, the app may collect: Location data (Approximate location, Precise location), Personal info (email, user ids, sexual orientation), Device or other IDs. When you mean anonymous you mean anonymous only for other users of the platform directly?

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).

[version_five]

I'd say "anonymously" should be removed from the title in light of that. Maybe "a space for asking questions while we mine your personal information" would be more appropriate.

[johnnyo]

And setting up an account on Apple with a privacy address asks me for my birthday, my gender, and my home address

Certainly doesn’t feel anonymous

[graypegg]

Evergreen idea (Q&A board), and congrats on the launch!

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.

[phailhaus]

This is an excellent point. I already ask questions on Google and I've never felt like I needed to pay to get a good answer. And by making it app-only, I don't even know what it looks like or what the quality of the answers are. I can't even imagine what an answer I'm willing to pay for would look like.

[luisamodio]

We do get your point and have given it ample thought.

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!

[anileated]

If the purpose of this is not to data mine and train AIs to sell, prove it with ToS. If it is, be upfront perhaps. Of all places here people kind of get how it works.

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.

[luisamodio]

So, no our plan is not to train AI models to then substitute the catchers. In fact we have a completely different philosophical approach as all the emerging AI trends do. We believe AI is great technology and tool but our values and purpose are to improve the way humans interact online. So, we will use AI to make better matching and be able to provide appropriate people to the appropriate question, thus providing a better experience. But we want people to thrive on both ends of this service. Thats why we built it that way. Plus AI is great at many things but we also believe regardless of how powerful a model is, there are things it will never be able to replace, like an empathetic human response to a person in need. The human touch...

[version_five]

Why is it automatically a bad thing if they use the data to train llms? Who is losing under this situation?

[Pannoniae]

The words "safe" and "comfortable" indicate to me that this will be an overcensored hugbox where they'll sell your data to the largest bidder. Only having a mobile app is also a huge red flag.

[luisamodio]

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.

[replwoacause]

Looks nice, I’ve had this idea before and see the need for it, but don’t have the skillset to build it.

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?

[dang]

Related:

Show HN: Throw – The new space for asking and answering questions anonymously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30801845 - March 2022 (47 comments)

[luisamodio]

Yes, we did a test post a year ago without a product... But now were live! :)

[nonameiguess]

With respect, I would like to see some evidence of your assertion that anonymous communication results in higher quality content than when the question answerer is known. The highest quality information content I'm aware of is in textbooks and scientific journals where the author's reputation is on the line. Contrast that with the wall of a public restroom, which is pure shitposts.

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.

[egello]

I don't know exactly why but usage of corporate memphis makes it a bit jarring for me.

[brucethemoose2]

First of all, this is a good idea and a cool app.

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.

[rvba]

How do you defend the service against answers copied from chatGPT?

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?

[luisamodio]

Good question.

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.

[shawnb576]

This seems very similar to Secret [1]? IIRC there were some competitive apps at the time, YikYak maybe?

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)

[vorpalhex]

> 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.

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".

[luisamodio]

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.

Hope this helps answer your question.

[whoomp12342]

cool idea but why does it have to be exclusively an app?

[luisamodio]

Thanks! Eventually we do want to develop a web app but given that it does have that social media (multimedia and user intractability) component of it the best way to approach it and provide the best user experience was through a mobile app.

[colonwqbang]

Feedback: Your website doesn't have much content. Instead of a flowery text description of the product, you could just show some of the best or most upvoted content you have right now.

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.

[luisamodio]

It may be that you're outside of the USA. Were currently providing service on the USA only.

[jacobwg]

Do you have a trademark on the word "throw"? The page title is currently "Throw™" and many of the instances of Throw have the (tm), but I can only find the trademark application for your logo design (serial 97072015).

[luisamodio]

Yes we do.

[yetanother12345]

FYI this seems to be an app for cellphones. No Q&A on the web site, that's just a landing page.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just thought it was a web site.

[gitgud]

> There is no limit to the type of questions or the topic you may ask

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...

[alangibson]

Do you have objective evidence showing that common, non-business users are willing to pay for crowdsourced answers?

[Tao3300]

> Depression, anxiety, and loneliness advice

How do you know if your users are qualified to give that advice?

[luisamodio]

Through several metrics we continuously measure we determine reliability of users. So, empathetic and positive users that are constantly providing good answers receive a higher score and in the contrary the opposite is true. The higher the score the more questions the user gets assigned and the more he earns per response. People that are better qualified thrive and people that are not fall behind on this meritocratic system where users have to earn their place.

[LaundroMat]

Have you tested it with real users before launching? What did you learn that was different from your initial theories (on e.g. incentives, handling low value content, ...) for realizing your ideal?

[spokeonawheel]

finally, the real engine behind chatgpt

[revskill]

Useless without a desktop app. Who even uses a smartphone (too small screen and stupid keyboard) in 2023 ?

[version_five]

Yeah I never see anyone on their phone

[blowski]

Replying from my smartphone.