[DanAndersen]

Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral."

I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.