Twitter’s Trending Topics: They’re mostly celebrity news, huge sporting events and idiotic hashtags where people continue so give examples of “3 words after sex” or “girl you crazy” and other really stupid tags that never ever end.
For the longest time, the idiotic hashtag memes on Twitter have been dominated by non-bubble folk. I can’t make ANY generalizations here without sounding ignorant but it’s safe to say that the majority of those trends were dominated by teenage girls and, oddly enough, those of African American descent. No, this isn’t MY opinion. Here are some other people with the same observation – 1, 2, 3, 4 just so I’m not called out for being racist which is bound to happen but data doesn’t lie. There have been a few non-tech-bubble articles about why most of the trending hashtag topics that JUST WON’T DIE are dominated by African Americans but I honestly don’t care. As long as it’s not all talk about Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, I’m happy.
Here are a few of the top trending topics of this year:
- ThatAwkwardMomentWhen
- YouLookGoodBut
- ImJustSaying
- TheBrokeFriend
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Last night, an article on the popular Techcrunch blog which is a mix of news, commentary and opinion mostly around companies based exclusively in Silicon Valley and most companies written about there get preferred treatment if you A) know one of the writers or B) worked for / started / invested in a popular company that TechCrunch writes about a lot.
No one at TechCrunch will deny bias but I do see they try to keep things honest and fair most of the time. Now that I live outside of the bubble, I see the bias more and more.
*side note: this article isn’t really any opinion of my employer. this is kind of my own opinion :) *
Here’s a post on TechCrunch last night. It’s called “#LessAmbitiousMovies Aims To Sort Of Take Over Part Of Your Twitter Stream”
Now, the topic took a very long time to trend on Twitter and only remained a trend for an hour and ONLY if you had Twitter set to show trends in “San Francisco”. In Boston, and other markets that have a trending topics area, I didn’t see the tag. In fact, Alexis’ commentary was:
“What’s notable about the meme is a) for some inexplicable reason it is not trending and b) that since it started a couple of hours ago the hashtag has suddenly saturated my (and probably your) entire Twitter stream”
I saw three of these tweets in my stream all from people who live in San Francisco and work for tech startups (and read TechCrunch). Alexis adds:
…the craziest Twitter hashtag meme I’ve ever seen, pacing at around 200 tweets per minute.
Um, to be blunt, you must not follow anyone outside of Silicon Valley. I do. In fact, of the 200 people I follow, most of them are middle-America normal people who are into tech but not into the tech scene. The only people I saw tweeting this were TechCrunch & Mashable writers and a couple of people who follow those writers as well.
A commenter on Techcrunch does a great job of summing up my first point:
I unfortunately have to follow, for work purposes, the tweets of all TC writers and it seemed that 90% of the entries came from TC writers, TC fanboys and others in the self-designated Silicon Valley “cool crowd”, and it became annoying after about 5 minutes. I like Twitter, but a perfect example of its downside – a bunch of self-absorbed people thinking that everyone should benefit from their “genius” – to the point of even making a TC post about it.
Yup.
What’s most interesting is that the site, “What the trend” that shows top charts on trending topics back to 1 week ago (you can pay if you want older data) has zero mention of this trending topic in the charts as a top hashtag over the past 24 hours. This really was a trending topic that only hit San Francisco for a few minutes and mostly went viral among tech elites.
The audacity of the writer (no offense. I think Alexis is a talented and generally balanced writer) to assume that this is a hot topic and growing like wildfire and OMFG THE CRAZIEST TRENDING TOPIC EVER is simply absurd. The truth is, there are trending topics that have been seeing 100 tweets a minute for nearly the entire year that haven’t had a TechCrunch post about them. There are trending topics that have had millions of tweets using those hashtags but I never saw them in my profile.
My point is, this is a classic case of silicon valley bubble hype for no reason at all. All you do is look at the raw data and compare it to other trending topics and it’ll soon become obvious that this is NOT a big deal and does NOT deserve a post.
Of course, this is Techcrunch’s editorial decision and most of the readers are Silicon Valley Bubble stricken (just as I sort of am from time to time) and it makes sense that this is “news”
I just wish that we’d occasionally take a step outside of the bubble before posting something as, “the craziest Twitter hashtag meme”
Well said.