An important political speech, a big earthquake, bombing... For this kind of situations, Twitter trending topics help a lot, because it provides you the most up-to-date source of news.
When critical situations happen, your priority is getting the news live. Correctness, officialness are less important. I don't know a better way to get that kind of news other than trending topics.
I do searches all the time to check whenever Github/Jira/whatever is down, or when there's some helicopter over my neighborhood, or even in major events, but as soon as it enters trending topics it's a bit less effective.
I think its low signal to noise ratio makes you ignore it, which is bad. But I think instead of just removing it, spams should be prevented more effectively. Because I know "trending" concept is useful when it works. HN, Reddit and some other aggregator sites have homepages with trending content, of course with varying degree of success.
> It's merely a tool that reacts to what is mostly useless/placeholder/redundant/uninteresting/spam content
Happy?
The current topic on my region is "#Hurentag" and the most relevant tweets are mostly "Happy #Hurentag", plus some spam from people linking to their Instagram.
The second is #getimpf which is just people making selfies, others complaining about the selfies, and some people trying to prop-up their blogs.
The third is "Switch Pro" which is one article by Verge and lots of people discussing why it's trending. Plus some blog and Instagram spam. There's also an OnlyFans spam showing up for me.
Then there's "Nintendo" which is the same as the above.
If you scroll down two pages on each topic you'll always see people posting unrelated things with the trending topic words/hashtags.
Apart from one post from The Verge on the top of "Switch Pro" and "Nintendo" there is NOTHING of value on those tweets. ZERO discussion. Nobody talking about anything.
The issue is not that it's useless. That's quite fun, actually. The issue is that it's not really a proper way of measuring what people are really talking about, because 99% of the content has NOTHING to do with the topic in question other than containing a word or hashtag.
> The only difference I can see between that and generating "lazy pseudo-journalism" is remuneration.
Not really. I'm doing this while I wait for my tests to run, so I'm definitely getting paid, probably more than journalists.