Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries
‘Twitter description guy’ isn’t a guy. It’s Twitter’s curation team, and I talked to the woman who runs it.
“Twitter description guy,” in users’ collective imagination, is a beleaguered soul, constantly scrambling to comprehend the bizarre subcultural memes that go viral on the site so that he can write sober-minded summaries of them for Twitter’s trending section. In December, Twitter’s description of a Minecraft-related trending topic led Twitch streamers and gamers to imagine a beleaguered “Twitter description guy”. They worked to make #TwitterGuyIsOverParty a trending hashtag in hopes that said Twitter guy would be forced to write a description of his own cancellation.
There is, of course, no single “Twitter description guy.” The descriptions are written by Twitter’s curation team, which is run by Joanna Geary, Twitter’s senior director for curation. To better understand how the curation team views its job, I spoke with her in February.
“Our goal is to give you the gist so you’re not spending five minutes looking at the trend trying to figure out what it even means,” she told me.
The trending module, which highlights words or phrases that are suddenly appearing in far more tweets than usual, has long been one of…
