[HN Gopher] Show HN: Throw - A space for asking and answering qu...
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Show HN: Throw - A space for asking and answering questions
anonymously
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 facades 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!
Author : luisamodio
Score : 18 points
Date : 2023-07-10 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trythrow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trythrow.com)
| [deleted]
| revskill wrote:
| Useless without a desktop app. Who even uses a smartphone (too
| small screen and stupid keyboard) in 2023 ?
| version_five wrote:
| Yeah I never see anyone on their phone
| blowski wrote:
| Replying from my smartphone.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > Depression, anxiety, and loneliness advice
|
| How do you know if your users are qualified to give that advice?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > 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".
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| 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.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| cool idea but why does it have to be exclusively an app?
| luisamodio wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| > provide the best user experience was through a mobile app
|
| Having 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?
| belthesar wrote:
| I often hear this rationale when starting with a social app,
| but I think that you may find that you pigeon hole your age
| demographic by only doing an app. Folks that are in the prime
| professional age bracket (gut check, late 20's to 30's) are
| going to spend more time on a larger screen device than they
| are on a smaller screen device. At the very least, if you're
| not planning on developing a tablet app right away, having a
| browser option is at least a stopgap between running a phone-
| size app on a tablet, or not at all while you work on that.
|
| 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.
| bloopernova wrote:
| What exactly does a mobile app do that a web page can't?
|
| Web pages play video and have interactive components just
| fine.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| alangibson wrote:
| Do you have objective evidence showing that common, non-business
| users are willing to pay for crowdsourced answers?
| mhitza wrote:
| 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).
| johnnyo wrote:
| 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
| luisamodio wrote:
| We do not collect name or any identity related personal
| information. The only thing that could relate to your person
| is the email address. However, it is only used to contact our
| users as it is never used otherwise or shown to anyone inside
| or out of the platform.
|
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| luisamodio wrote:
| See response below.
|
| We actually don't mine personal information.
| replwoacause wrote:
| 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?
| anileated wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why is it automatically a bad thing if they use the data to
| train llms? Who is losing under this situation?
| trog wrote:
| > Why is it automatically a bad thing if they use the data to
| train llms? Who is losing under this situation?
|
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's not that it's automatically a bad thing. It's that it's
| a thing many people will object to, so if that's what's being
| done, it should be disclosed.
| spokeonawheel wrote:
| finally, the real engine behind chatgpt
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, we did a test post a year ago without a product... But now
| were live! :)
| rvba wrote:
| 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?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 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.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| egello wrote:
| I don't know exactly why but usage of corporate memphis makes it
| a bit jarring for me.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| [flagged]
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(page generated 2023-07-10 23:02 UTC)