[ramblerouser]

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 editors in a backroom want you to see.

[sbuttgereit]

Sure, that's the idea, but it has no more chance of success than does Facebook purposefully curating to the masses... indeed: no curation suffers the same problem that someone's assumption about what I should be interested in, without first understanding me does: my wants, dreams, desires, fears, interests, curiosity, etc. are all out of the picture: be it the corporate curator or the unthinking algorithm, they all look the same. So, in the end "Fair Trending" is utterly useless to me; in fact, the posted site looks worse than Facebook curating the trending news... Facebook at least looked intelligently tone-deaf. The linked site... just looks mindless.

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.