Paper.li

» see paper.li as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

SmallRivers was a small Swiss company sitting on the science park at the EPFL in Lausanne. Edouard Lambelet and Iskander Pols put Paper.li into alpha in the spring of 2010, and the first link to it on Hacker News went up on 14 May that year under the flattest description anyone could have written: read Twitter as a newspaper. That was the whole product. You handed it a Twitter account or a hashtag, it collected the links that had been shared there over the past day, and it laid them out in columns under a masthead with your name on it.

People remember the tweet far better than the paper. When your edition published, Paper.li posted on your behalf, and the post always read the same way: The Something Daily is out, followed by a link and the @names of whoever had supplied the articles. Those mentions landed in the notifications of people who had never signed up for anything. For about four years there was a stranger's robot somewhere in every timeline, thanking you for a link you had forgotten posting.

It worked on a scale the Swiss press enjoyed reporting. Two million users by January 2011, when Kima Ventures and a row of European angels put in $2.1 million. By September 2013 the company had taken $7 million in total and claimed 3.7 million monthly users curating more than 50 million articles a day across seven languages. The write-ups of 2010 liked to point out that Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard were running papers.

~ the dossier ~

~ the daily is out ~

A British information consultant's blog posted the question in November 2010 as a headline: useful Twitter summary or major irritation? That was the live debate for years. The auto-tweet was the growth engine, because every published paper advertised itself inside other people's notifications, and no other free product of that era had a loop quite so cheap. It was also the reason the service collected a specific kind of resentment, the kind reserved for software that uses your name without asking.

Paper.li eventually added settings to turn the mentions off, which was the correct thing to do and which blunted the only mechanism that made it spread. The service was still growing on paper in 2013. It never found a second engine.

~ what it was actually for ~

By the time of the last funding round, the company had stopped describing Paper.li as a way to read Twitter. Lambelet told TechCrunch in 2013 that it had turned out to be "a super tool for content marketing and inbound marketing", which is a sentence you write when the hobbyists have drifted off and the invoices are coming from somewhere else.

That is the honest description of its last decade. It was a tool for people whose job requires publishing something every day, agencies and the consultants who need a digest to send their clients. I have never had that job, and nothing about building a branded daily out of other people's links was ever going to reach an engineer in Ankara except as a notification from someone who did.

~ the last paper ~

The notice went out in March 2023 and somebody posted it to Hacker News on the 21st, where it got three points and two comments. "We are writing to inform you that we will discontinue Paper.li on April 20, 2023. This decision was not easy, but after 13 years of providing our service, it is time to say goodbye." No reason and no buyer. After that date the papers went and the data was deleted.

Twitter had announced in February 2023 that free access to its API was ending. Paper.li had never been anything other than a reader of that API, and the arithmetic of paying for it on a freemium business with thirteen years of legacy accounts is not hard to imagine, though the company never said so. The capture calendar is tidier than the announcement: the archive holds a normal homepage on 20 April 2023 and a redirect on the 21st.

The domain is alive and belongs to somebody else now, a German WordPress blog whose own meta description opens "Paper.li war ein Online-Dienst", was, past tense. It also serves a paper.li wordmark, typewriter letters with a blue dot for the full stop, and that is where the logo at the top of this page came from: pulled off a live server this week, from a site that writes about the service as something finished while wearing its face.

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