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paper.li is your porn spam daily

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paper.li porn spam dailypaper.li made a big splash on Twitter last fall. By December, paper.lis were becoming a frequent visitor to the Twitter timeline.  I did a review on the good, the bad and the ugly of paper.li.  As I saw more of them being posted, I also began to wonder about a few things:

  • Are people actually reading them?
  • Do they have any effect on SEO?
  • Would they actually drive traffic to my site?
  • Do the people posting even realize they are posting?
  • How much more spam does the adult industry need?

I gave it a try, and one question was answered right away. No, I did not know when they were posting. I would see the occasional retweet and then would realize that my paper.li went out. They were also pulling from stories I would not necessarily choose. Because I did not know the post was going out, I did not see the paper before it was created. So no content approval.

The traffic question did not take long to answer. As more of my stories were caught in the paper.li generator, I watched my traffic sources to see how many billions of people were coming to my site because of this “paper”. Well, the answer was zero billions. In fact, I was not receiving any traffic from the tweets. At most I was getting the occasional retweet, which also generated no traffic.

So then I began to wonder if anyone was actually reading them. I don’t. When I see them, they just filter through my newsfeed like other auto-posting spam. The only time I open them up is when I see my name mentioned. Then I check the story and re-tweet. Even then, I don’t usually look at the other stories. About 1 in a 100 times I see another story in the paper where I actually click the link. I decided that if I am not reading them, the likelihood that other people were reading them was pretty slim.

The other issue is the idea of auto-content generation. paper.li automatically pulls content from specified users or keywords and then puts it together in the form of original content. The author credits are not always right, and if they are wrong there is nothing you can do about it. Once created they are posted to your account, jamming up the timeline with paper.li posts. Usually we call posts that jam up the timeline with content that we ignore spam,;why is this any different? Oh wait, it isn’t! At least the spam that jams up my news feed has boobies and man candy in it.

I like the idea of aggregating your favorite content into a single page and then sharing it with your followers. But this is more like phoning in your news aggregation. You have little control and it is just junking up the timeline. In fact, people are starting to block paper.li from their timelines. Which makes it officially what? SPAM!