Twitter trending topics had become a good way to play celebrity deadpool--only now every legitimate celebrity death is followed up by a fake one. After Michael Jackson died, we had fake rumors of Jeff Goldblum, Rick Astley, and Billy Mays.
(Wait... Billy Mays is actually dead? Jeez. How's anyone supposed to confirm anything these days? Does Twitter need Verified Death tweets?)
Now, almost every day, I see trends starting from people who are clearly gaming the system or that just aren't interesting at all to most people.
Aircraft Loadmaster anyone? WTF is this?
If you're going to make Twitter trends relevant again, you need to start focusing on who's creating the tweet (influencer versus some job posting bot vs a bot that just picks out trend names to get in the flow) and what their reputation is.
Trends have become a mess--inviting spam, gaming, marketing and combinations of the three. Kill it for now and come back when it's fixed and it's not so easy to glom onto it.