Twitter trend descriptions

If you click on a trending topic and notice that it doesn't have a description, and you know what the topic is referring to, you can head over to What The Trend and tell us! Our trend descriptions are sourced from their site, so it's possible that all or part of your contribution could show up on Twitter.

Twitter Help Center - About Trending Topics

So fair enough, let's have a look at http://whatthetrend.com/

So really quite a good description as the top item, with a rather uninformative suggested update.

Now oddly, Twitter doesn't expose trend descriptions well in its official Twitter app (and I can't find anywhere they're shown on the Twitter website anymore).  Nevertheless, if you go to the trends bar at the top of the app display (a new feature so disliked by some that it has been given a rather amusing moniker), and select the trend, you get to a trend/search screen which has an unobtrusive, unlabelled tag icon in the lower left, which will give you the trend description.

Except the description it gives you, instead of being the consensus description, appears to be the latest update. Which is sort of useless.

The Echofon app also has the same behaviour.  To see trends, go to the Search screen, then scroll down to trends, then tap the blue question mark to see the trend description.

If Twitter really is going to play a useful role in helping us understand what is going on, "trend" descriptions (which are really keyword and hashtag descriptions) are going to have to work better than this.