Automated content curation and why I deleted my paper.li account

I’ve come to realize that automatic content curation is just not worth the bother. For the past year and a half my Twitter account has been linked to an automatic curation service called paper.li. You may have seen the tweets going out: “The Gadgets Daily is now out!” everyday like clockwork.

I’ve noticed that there wasn’t much value to the service plus it could appear to people like my Twitter account is sending out spam, which personally I don’t want to be associated with. So as of today I’ve discontinued my use of paper.li and even gone as far to delete the account.

The service curated links from my Twitter lists and other sources on the web but I’ve felt that the value that I’ve gotten from the service personally has been minimal to zero. The value that my readers have gotten from the service I feel has been about the same and could have been more of an annoyance for anybody following @vancouvergadget on Twitter than anything else. Perhaps the auto-tweets resulted in a loss of readership. I for one loathe those who use auto-DM services on Twitter to send form letter thank you notes.

From this day forward I pledge to manually curate content and links that I share, in other words what you see will have been posted either by myself or by other blog contributors. So what do you think? Do you use automatic content curation services like paper.li? What kind of response have you received from your followers?