The only reason the automated Twitter Trends exist is to keep Twitter itself relevant, as it generates lazy pseudo-journalism articles such as "such and such was a trend".
It's merely a tool that reacts to spam. Even when it's for a good cause it's just people manipulating an algorithm by saying absolutely nothing of value.
Nothing of value to the humanity will be lost if they nuke this feature tomorrow.
What I didn't understand was why this is even a problem, but they explain it in the article:
> Broader media outlets report on trends, which are used as a proxy for what people are talking about
Fair enough that Twitter doesn't want to be manipulated, I can understand that. Still it should not have a real world impact in my mind. Except that you're right in that "lazy pseudo-journalism" picks this stuff up and report on it, as if it was real news, without doing any fact finding of their own. It's a silly "what's trending" box, it's not actually a source you can use, because we don't know what the criteria Twitter uses to generate it.
News media is moving to fast, and there's a desire to provide 24/7 news coverage, on a budget, so they resort to using whatever silly online gadget is available. Journalist should be WAY more critical about using Twitter and tweets as actual sources of news.
Exactly. You have to wonder if this is what's responsible for cancel culture. Issues being called out that have only become an issue recently. It could explain how it's out of control it has become.
I certainly think that's one reason. There are way to many stupid posts from Twitter, and Facebook, which are blown completely out of proportion and taken to level of conflict which wouldn't have happened previously.
Sure there are absolutely some issues from social media that are worth highlighting in the news media, but all shit storms and online controversies aren't created equally. To often one or two posts are taken out of context, especially on Twitter where people try to cram their message into as few words as possible. That is then elevated to "This person is horrible" or "All people in this group are bad".
The reality is that some people are just assholes, and while annoying and terrible, it's simply not worth writing about.
We would need to convince people in society that it's not "worth writing about", which isn't going to happen. It's radical information freedom. People get access to information they would never have had access to previously. A drawback of that is that people become free to act on information they would never have had access to previously.
The thing about Twitter, (about most social media actually), is that they are built on the reality that the vast majority of the population believe this stuff is, indeed, "worth writing about". That's how they make their money. Everyone writing about what everyone else wrote about. Business is good precisely because everyone thinks all this stuff is "worth writing about". And there is no sign anyone will meaningfully change.
I don't see much hope actually. My best advice is try to maintain your privacy. (Well, I guess also "don't be an asshole" is pretty good advice as you intimate.)
But if this study is to be believed, it shows that many of these viral storms could very well be inauthentic or non-organic. In other words, they are not naturally occurring. They only rise to people's consciousness out of nefarious intent. Take out the algorithm and you might have more sensible trending topics.
I have a friend who is moderating a pride-relevant subreddit this month. They plan to postpone most of their social engagements in anticipation of the drama so they can keep the discussion reasonable. Imagine how it must get that they need to commit so much time
I really wish the use of twitter as a method of gauging the hoi polloi's opinion would just end.
It infects everything. I listen to podcasts and everything from coding podcasts to sports involves someone saying "i know people on twitter" or something like that before they give their thoughts.
Bro I turned the podcast to hear from you, I don't care how it relates to twitter.
A while back there was a 'fan revolt' among fans of a sports team I follow. So I hit twitter and it's as far as I can tell ... two dozen accounts and more than half had never tweeted more than 3 tweets...
That sentence is only meaningful in the context of this article-- one in which research uncovered spammers who found a specific way to game Twitter's algorithm in order to exploit it to skew the results.
Take away the research and the source for your sentence is either, "people who are saying..." or, "everybody on HN already knows..."
The only difference I can see between that and generating "lazy pseudo-journalism" is remuneration.
> It's merely a tool that reacts to what is mostly useless/placeholder/redundant/uninteresting/spam content
Happy?
The current topic on my region is "#Hurentag" and the most relevant tweets are mostly "Happy #Hurentag", plus some spam from people linking to their Instagram.
The second is #getimpf which is just people making selfies, others complaining about the selfies, and some people trying to prop-up their blogs.
The third is "Switch Pro" which is one article by Verge and lots of people discussing why it's trending. Plus some blog and Instagram spam. There's also an OnlyFans spam showing up for me.
Then there's "Nintendo" which is the same as the above.
If you scroll down two pages on each topic you'll always see people posting unrelated things with the trending topic words/hashtags.
Apart from one post from The Verge on the top of "Switch Pro" and "Nintendo" there is NOTHING of value on those tweets. ZERO discussion. Nobody talking about anything.
The issue is not that it's useless. That's quite fun, actually. The issue is that it's not really a proper way of measuring what people are really talking about, because 99% of the content has NOTHING to do with the topic in question other than containing a word or hashtag.
> The only difference I can see between that and generating "lazy pseudo-journalism" is remuneration.
Not really. I'm doing this while I wait for my tests to run, so I'm definitely getting paid, probably more than journalists.
I don't use trending topics in ordinary days. It helps me a lot when something important happened recently.
An important political speech, a big earthquake, bombing... For this kind of situations, Twitter trending topics help a lot, because it provides you the most up-to-date source of news.
When critical situations happen, your priority is getting the news live. Correctness, officialness are less important. I don't know a better way to get that kind of news other than trending topics.
But you don't need trending topics for that. It can be replaced with a simple search, which is way more effective. Having important news jumping into the trending topics tend to add noise to the search because of the popularity.
I do searches all the time to check whenever Github/Jira/whatever is down, or when there's some helicopter over my neighborhood, or even in major events, but as soon as it enters trending topics it's a bit less effective.
I also thought about just using search. But trending topics let me know if something important is happening when I'm not aware. I still think it's valuable at times, while I also think it may be spammy and should be improved.
I think its low signal to noise ratio makes you ignore it, which is bad. But I think instead of just removing it, spams should be prevented more effectively. Because I know "trending" concept is useful when it works. HN, Reddit and some other aggregator sites have homepages with trending content, of course with varying degree of success.
It's merely a tool that reacts to spam. Even when it's for a good cause it's just people manipulating an algorithm by saying absolutely nothing of value.
Nothing of value to the humanity will be lost if they nuke this feature tomorrow.