Josh here from https://trennd.co/ which I recently built and launched on Show HN too. We're tackling the same problem of surfacing new trends, just in different ways!
Interested to hear more about how you validate trends and reduce noise. I'm inclined to agree that this is the biggest challenge. I'm guessing it's a lot of manual verification on your end?
Yes, fun stuff to be working on!
We use a number of strategies to cut through the noise. One of strategies that's easiest to articulate is comparing a topic's trend lines on different channels to identify organic growth vs. inorganic growth. This is because we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data from one channel.
We're also more inclined to share trends that we think have room to grow, as one of our internal metrics is the growth multiple of all trends we cover.