Twitter trends and layers of meta-commentary

I'm impressed with Twitter Trends, in a particular way. (I usually have them hidden but reenabled them for #COVID) I'm impressed by their capacity for meta-commentary. #Hantavirus probably started trending w ppl freaking out, but now the top tweets are "guys this isn't news"

Mar 24, 2020

I've seen this countless times with many trends—by the time I see the trend, it's actually #TweetsAboutThisTrend instead. ie tweets that are participating in the commentary about the trendingness itself.

All Of Tapenade @AllOfTapenade · Mar 21, 2020

even as the world might end still post #TweetsAboutThisTrend watch the social contract bend under #TweetsAboutThisTrend make the social fabric mend with your #TweetsAboutThisTrend stay home and call your dad & friends: "love you #TweetsAboutThisTrend"

Now, I suspect that in some cases this probably ends up burying the object-level news to an unhelpful degree. C'est la vie. It's still the polar opposite of clicking a news headline and reading the whole article before *maybe* seeing it debunked in the comments.

Can we do better? What if @Twitter organized its trending tweets by sentiment & level of meta? (could train a classifier for that) Would ~untangle current paradox of "if you think X shouldn't be trending on object level, have to tweet "nvm X" but that boosts trendingness of X"

Mmm. I'm enjoying finding my way back into making meta-meta-commentary about #TwitterReplacement etc etc. Have been a bit stuck in the Global Events groove as far as twitter's been concerned. twitter.com/robinsloan/sta…

On a note that's so tangentially related it might as well be unrelated, check out this epic live electronic performance by @DeLongMusic youtube.com/watch?v=wnzEKy…