Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about &quot;what&#x27;s trending&quot; 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&#x27;s some sign of &quot;people making something go viral.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t likely to be the result of &quot;pure algorithms&quot;). But the fact that it&#x27;s called &quot;trending&quot; inherently implies that it&#x27;s a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it&#x27;s a passive record into what &quot;is trending.&quot; By manually inserting or removing things from the &quot;trending&quot; list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren&#x27;t popular.