Twitter needs to fix or ditch 'Trends'

Most people enjoy a bit of silliness and scandal, but too much is too much

Regular Twitter users know the site's homepage "Trends" box as the place to look for big breaking news, celebrity deaths (real and fake), as well as hashtag silliness such as #IfTwitterWereHighSchool.

The latter can provide a guilty pleasure when genuinely amusing (which is to say, rarely), but most of the time the hashtag games have come to render "Trends" all but useless as a news-monitoring tool. Right now they're hogging the top eight "Trend" spots, with numbers nine and 10 devoted to a pair of sex scandals:

Trends: United States · change

#kindofabigdealPromoted

#DrakeCriesWhen

#IfTwitterWereHighschool

#UKnowUHungryWhen

#FastFoodAddiction

#AnnoyingThingsPeopleSay

#macmillerproblems

#Womenlawviolation

Glen Rice

Scarlett Johansson

Kind of makes one long for a fake celebrity death.

It seems time for Twitter to either pull the plug on "Trends," or perhaps split the feature into two: a "Sandbox" for the likes of today's fare, and a "Breaking" box for real news.

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