1 Introduction
In this section we describe what personly is all about, what its objectives are, and how you as the user can benefit from using our platform.
2 Why
Craigslist Personals formed the inspiration for personly. It was a simple platform where anyone could post a classified ad within the personals section. Anyone on the entire Internet could then respond to the ad via email. Subsequent communication was then conducted entirely through anonymous email addresses that Craigslist provided. The Craigslist Personals section was a great source of amusement, with many people having fond memories of their encounters using the platform. It was a refreshing alternative to the boring matching apps that formed the online dating market and continue to dominate our perception of online dating.
Craigslist Personals had a dark side however, including sexual trafficking, misrepresentation, and general lewd behaviour by the participants. Abuse was rampant and without adequate safeguards in place, the personals section of Craigslist was forced to shut down in 2018.
Furthermore, the website was difficult to use. Challenges for the platform included managing multiple personals through email addresses, lack of proper filtering options, and lack of proper spam control for female participants especially. Ultimately these challenges made the Craigslist Personals section difficult to scale and attract more users.
personly aims to improve everything that was broken about Craigslist Personals while keeping true to the spirit of meeting interesting and cool people in an easy way that preserves privacy. personly aims to walk the tightrope between anonymous freedom of expression while maintaining a safe space for the participants where abuse and spam are controlled in an effective way.
3 Mission
The goal of personly is to provide a controlled, anonymous, and safe way for people to connect to each other. personly accomplishes this goal via the introduction of an anonymous tokenized personal, matching those personals in a smart way as well as direct messaging the matches. These four pillars form the foundation for the personly platform.
4 Pillars
4.1 Anonymous Personals
personly is modernizing personals. You may know of personals if you have ever seen a newspaper or various popular classified websites such as craigslist. If you have ever visited the "personals" section of these platforms, you will find many ads in which someone describes themselves and what they are looking for. This is a personal!
Personals, especially anonymous ones, are great because they allow for a greater sense of self expression than can be achieved by existing photo and interest based matching applications. However, the traditional approach of making a single personal to accommodate for all interests is too narrow. Matching is time consuming since one has to sift through all the personals out there.
With personly, management of your personals is easy. You can create multiple personals across different cities, genders and interests. You can cancel them and make new ones, all with the benefit of remaining anonymous and enjoying the ability to express yourself as you see fit.
4.2 Token Based
A tokenized personal is a personal which has a token value assigned to it. The amount of tokens one wishes to spend per personal corresponds to the amount of exposure one wishes their personal to receive.
Tokenized personals allow for the creation of a dynamic evolving self balancing market in which economics plays a central role in creating a fair, abuse free platform for all participants. People will not feel either overwhelmed for receiving too many matches or feel isolated by receiving too few, thus creating a greater sense of inclusivity and equalness than can be found on most other online services.
Tokenized personals further ensure not only that abuse on the platform is naturally limited, but also that the experience of using the platform is the exact same for everyone, thus avoiding another common pitfall of many services in providing completely orthogonal feature sets to paying vs. non paying customers. Simply pay for more tokens and use the platform to its fullest.
4.3 Smart Matching
While many services these days are relying on common interests to improve matching, personly takes a different approach by examining not only aspects of personal and message metadata to determine matching criteria but also feedback provided by unmatching potential partners.
Economics also plays a role in that should someone start spamming the platform by creating unnecessary amounts of personals, the cost per personal will go up, resulting in one's tokens becoming depleted much faster as more personals are made. The end result is a level playing field for all.
4.4 Direct Messaging
No matching platform would be complete without offering the ability to directly message your matches. personly allows real time communication between your matches and offers the feature of being allowed to preview your matches and cancel them, receiving back the token value of the match.
5 Future Growth
With these foundational pillars in place, personly is well positioned to deliver users a profoundly new and engaging experience for human interaction based on anonymous personal matching. personly is fundamentally a new approach to online matching which can form the basis for additional functionality and take online matching to a whole new level.
For example, the ability to match multiple people to an organization to create events, or rematch people based on different characteristics are brand new features already enabled in the platform. personly continues to look for new ways to be innovative and bring people together.
6 Conclusion
We hope that you, the user, take great joy in using personly and that it helps you find what you are looking for in this life. We hope you have as much fun using the platform as we have had in developing it. We are always available for support and appreciate any feedback given via our support ticket system. Thank you for your time and be sure to visit the FAQ in case you have any more questions about personly.