

Show HN: PressRise – A blogging platform with community voting and aggregation - chjohasbrouck
https://www.pressrise.com/about

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hellbanTHIS
Good timing. What's it running on?

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chjohasbrouck
It was originally written in Rails, but was rewritten in Laravel, a framework
by Taylor Otwell who's a really smart guy
([http://laravel.com](http://laravel.com)).

I wanted to go with PHP because I'm thinking I might want to do an open source
GNU/GPL version that ties directly into PressRise.com at some point in the
future, and the general population seems more comfortable with PHP for that
kind of thing.

~~~
hellbanTHIS
Funny I was just looking at building a reddit clone in Laravel, did you use
Redis?

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chjohasbrouck
I haven't implemented Redis for this project, but I know it well and that's
something that would probably happen if it came time to scale things.

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chjohasbrouck
This is the prototype/MVP of an idea I had for a blogging platform. It was
only made public a few hours ago so it's a ghost town, and it's very basic
because I want to iterate based on user feedback, but here's the idea.

For bloggers: It's a blogging platform where you can create your own hosted
independent blog. Your blog will receive a built-in audience, and your posts
will automatically be promoted to that audience, all for free.

For readers: It's a blogging community where you can read, comment, and vote
on blog posts. The newest and best content is always easy to find because it
rises to the top based on your votes.

The aggregator frontend works a lot like Reddit or Imgur, but for blogging.

I can think of a lot of advantages this system would have over current
blogging platforms and content aggregators.

For blogging platforms the advantage is obviously the built-in audience. It's
hard to get that by submitting your blog to current aggregators because of
rules against self-promotion, difficulties in finding the right subreddit,
domain loyalty, and hug of death.

The advantages over current aggregators might be less obvious though:

1\. Users would be able to post almost any form of content imaginable, not
just external links or images

2\. The content is hosted, no hug of death ever, + all the other benefits of
hosting the content yourself

3\. Content moderation would scale much more easily, because blog owners would
each be responsible for their own blog. This could lead to faster and greater
diversification of content. On reddit for example I feel like there's a lot of
content that people miss out on because it can't be done at a scale that's
active and moderated

4\. If this ever were to be monetized, the monetization plan wouldn't be
murky. It'd actually be really straightforward and proven

5\. Content has a life beyond its 12-hour expiration date. Blog posts are
naturally formatted for SEO and it actually makes sense for Google to index
them, unlike a Reddit or Imgur submission page. So traffic can be referred
internally or externally, and continue to receive steady traffic over long
periods of time

I'm really interested to hear your feedback on this. I'm wondering what the
biggest flaws are with the concept, and what challenges I will face if I
pursue it. I'm also hoping to get some direction on the design and features so
I can get back to development. I'm also anticipating the mother of all
chicken-and-egg problems, so advice on how to overcome that is appreciated as
well.

If any developers or designers are interested in joining me to develop this
idea, there's a contact form on the main website, or you can email me directly
at my username on Google's email service.

~~~
minimaxir
> _For bloggers: It 's a blogging platform where you can create your own
> hosted independent blog. Your blog will receive a built-in audience, and
> your posts will automatically be promoted to that audience, all for free._

This, along with other bullet points in your post, is the exact same value
proposition as Medium, and given the troubles Medium is hitting with a much
greater staff and venture capital, that's not exactly comforting.

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nacs
Not affiliated with this project in any way but that comparison is not quite
the same thing, Medium's promotions to their audience are heavily skewed
towards the things they manually curate.

This platform would let anyone be exposed to a larger audience if the content
is upvoted by people enough.

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kolev
Nice and clean. I only wish it was available as FOSS as well.

