OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here. I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (…
I totally agree that popular stuff is beneath us techno wizards, but thats not the point of fairtrending. The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook 'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a dozen editor…
At the end of the day nobody should second hand their interests and be so passive as to care at all what "trends". In fact, a pure random pick out of all the possible options would likely be more interesting and engaging than this "Fair Trending" can do or corporate engagement efforts... while a random pick certainly wouldn't be perfect, it at least it surface interesting and original ideas/content that don't necessarily click the "group-think" and "lowest-common-denominator" boxes.