Who Could You Meet in the Library?

About a year ago, a new sort of dating website popped up on the island, one that removed the ‘swipe left’ culture of some apps and instead focussed more on the people behind the pics.

The Library, created by a husband and wife team on the island, uses daily questions and matches people using algorithms to help people have a proper connection with someone.

To celebrate a year of the library, we spoke to one of its creators, who we’re going to call Matt for discretionary reasons, about its success.

He said: ‘The Library is a web-based dating site. It is based on the founding principle that the way we think is more important than the way we look when it comes to getting along with each other. As such, it serves as an antidote to the instant judgment swipe culture of other dating apps.

‘Alongside gender, age and sexuality preferences, our algorithm matches members based on their answers to the daily OR. An OR is a question that drops into a member’s email inbox every day.’

The questions are based on the categories from the Dewey Decimal system (the way libraries are organised): Arts and Recreation, History and Geography, Philosophy and Psychology, Technology, Literature, Food and Drink and Place.

When a member responds to an OR, they are matched with other members who have answered in the same way as them. In the Matches section of their homepage, they will find all of the members with whom they have matched, ranked from top to bottom of the number of ORs in which they have answered in the same way. Members can then choose to connect with anyone in their Matches. For a connection to complete, both members have to agree to it. Once connected, members can chat within The Library in a private chat.

Matt said: ‘The idea was born from two sources. The first came from my wife, who had the initial idea in one of the lockdowns of bringing people together based on their literary preferences. A typical OR would have been something like Shakespeare or Burroughs (connected by their first name William). When we started to generate some ORs to see if the idea had legs, we realised that the literary focus was too narrow. That’s when we broadened to the Dewey Decimal system, and then thought of the brand name The Library. As the whole notion is to take things slowly and quietly, the branding seemed to fit. 

‘The second was a single friend who was being harassed by someone that they had met through another dating site. Things had gone cold pretty quickly from their side, but because they had given lots of personal information away in a relatively short period of time, their jilted former friend pursued them quite aggressively. So, we wondered if there was a way of connecting people without compromising privacy. In connecting that thought to the matching through cultural preferences thought, we then realised we could have a USP of not sharing images at all, and how this might create more authentic and genuine connections.’

The Cost

While many dating apps rely on ads, The Library relies on a payment system where members buy stamps to connect with other members.

Matt explained: ‘Each completed connection costs two Library Stamps. When members join, they are given 4 Library Stamps, enough to make two connections. Thereafter, members can purchase more Library Stamps, but we always advise to only buy as many as they need. 

‘We have this payment model so that members do not get tied into, and subsequently forget about, a monthly subscription. We want to offer value to our members, and only want them to pay what they use. The Library is also an ad-free environment, because we want our members to feel that they are in a relatively private online space where they are not being hounded, sold to, and where their data is not being harvested. There is no paywall for members not to see ads, there simply aren’t any ads.

‘We receive no money from affiliate links, and the minimal data we do collect on our members is used only for matching members.’

Numbers and Safety

Beginning with a group of about 40 who signed up before the service launched, Matt said The Library has grown to around 220 members, this is despite not advertising and only using Facebook and Twitter to boost their numbers.

Of those who have matched, Matt said The Library is aware of one engagement and a good number of people who have left the site have reported that they have met each other there.

Matt said: ‘We are determined to be a site where people can meet without compromising their privacy. When you match with someone, they only see your username, gender, age and town. Only when you connect does your first name get revealed.

‘We generate a username for every member, as our research indicated that when coming up with usernames for any site, we tend to give something away about ourselves. The username that we generate for each member is a combination of a colour and a flower.

‘We encourage members only to reveal more about themselves when they feel confident with the person they are talking to. We encourage people to take it slowly. Chats are not encrypted, which means that should we need to, we can investigate any breach of our guidelines, and we state in our T+Cs that we will inform the police if we suspect that any law has been broken through the conduct of any members within The Library.’

Future

From here, The Library intends to grow into the UK, but for now the focus is very much on the island. There are also plans for an app and continuing to improve the system based on users’ experience.

If you want to know more about The Library, head on over to www.thelibrary.im.