I honestly thought the era of human-curated discovery was dead, buried under mountains of engagement-obsessed algorithmic feeds. Then WordPress.com dropped the news: Freshly Pressed WordPress is officially back. If you’ve been building on this platform as long as I have—going back to the 4.x days—you know exactly what this means. It was the “front page of the internet” for bloggers before Reddit dominated the conversation.
In a web currently choked by SEO-hackery and AI-generated fluff, the return of human curation feels like a refactor of the entire social discovery model. We need to talk about why this matters, specifically for those of us running self-hosted sites who think this is just a “WordPress.com thing.” It isn’t.
Why Freshly Pressed WordPress Beats the Algorithm
Most discovery engines today rely on race conditions of engagement: likes, shares, and rapid-fire comments. This creates a bottleneck where only the most “viral” content survives, often at the expense of technical depth or genuine storytelling. Freshly Pressed WordPress operates on a different logic. It’s curated by people who actually read the posts, looking for humor, originality, and strong points of view.
For a developer or a business owner, this is a massive win. You aren’t fighting a “shadow ban” or trying to figure out if your latest post didn’t trend because you missed a specific keyword. If the content is good, it has a chance. But there’s a technical catch for those of us on self-hosted installs.
The Technical Requirement: Is Your Site Visible?
If you’re not on WordPress.com, you need the Jetpack plugin to be in the running for a feature. The curators pull from the WordPress.com Reader ecosystem, which uses the Jetpack connection as a bridge. Specifically, your site needs to be successfully syncing its posts via the REST API to the WordPress.com infrastructure.
I’ve seen dozens of sites where the Jetpack connection is “active” but the sync is failing silently due to a transient error or a server-side firewall blocking the XML-RPC or REST API endpoints. If your site isn’t syncing, the curators won’t even see your masterpiece.
<?php
/**
* Quick check to see if your site is actually talking to the Jetpack shadows.
* Prefix: bbioon_
*/
function bbioon_check_discovery_readiness() {
if ( ! class_exists( 'Jetpack' ) ) {
return 'Jetpack is missing. No Freshly Pressed for you.';
}
if ( ! Jetpack::is_active() ) {
return 'Connection is dead. Curators can\'t see you.';
}
// Check if the site is in "Publicize" mode or private
if ( get_option( 'blog_public' ) == '0' ) {
return 'Your site is set to private. Discovery is disabled.';
}
return 'You are in the running. Go write something great.';
}
?>Refactoring Your Content Strategy
Stop chasing the trending metrics for a second. The return of Freshly Pressed WordPress suggests a pivot back toward quality. When I mentor junior devs, I always tell them: “Code for the machine, but write for the human.” This update reinforces that. You can find the full collection of featured work on the official Discover page.
Furthermore, you can now pipe these curated feeds directly into your own site or reader via RSS. The transparency of human curation means you get a slower, more deliberate stream of content that hasn’t been homogenized by a neural network’s idea of “relevance.”
Look, if this Freshly Pressed WordPress stuff or keeping your Jetpack sync healthy is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The Takeaway on Human Curation
The return of Freshly Pressed is a reminder that the WordPress ecosystem still values the “web of people.” Whether you’re a hobbyist or a high-traffic publisher, focus on the presentation and the story. Ensure your technical bridge (Jetpack) is solid, and then just ship it. The curators are finally back in the booth.
“},excerpt:{raw:
