[Idea for rubygems.org] Display "trends" or "trendy gems"

[rubyFeedback]

This is a proposal for the webpage on https://rubygems.org/. I don't know where it may
fit; perhaps a new entry or under "stats". Perhaps in the listing on the middle right
that shows:

STATUS
UPTIME
CODE
DATA
DISCUSS
STATS
CONTRIBUTE
ABOUT
HELP
API
SECURITY
MAINTAINERS WANTED

Anyway. What is meant with the term "trends" or "trendy gems"?

This kind of shows some percentage increase of downloaded gems,
after a threshold cut-off value. Something where we are given a
list of, say, 3 or 10 (the top ten) trendy gems right now. Perhaps just
a monthly snapshot, a bit similar to TIOBE, and solely on the dataset
of rubygems.org (so, internal dataset).

What would the benefit be of this?

Well - I think it may help get some exposure to a few gems that are
currently downloaded by folks (in this context, per month; but it
could be biweekly or weekly too; I just think monthly popular gems
may be useful).

We may have to assign some priorities, rankings and rules here to
avoid gaming the system and what not. So, a gem may be ranked
only once per month, for the whole year or so. We may also give
new gems a slight advantage initially (for the first year); if we mention
it via score/points then this could be some point boost or so. Downloads
could be counted via 1 point == 1k downloads or so, and we could
tweak the system to see how it may be most useful for folks.

Some ruby users may not know which gems may be useful or not,
also in part because a lot happens on github. I find most gems via
github actually, where I first look at the project page and then
decide whether I'd use the gem or try it out. This is a bit unfortunate
because it kind of devalues rubygems.org as a news-worthy
website, so it may be useful to make rubygems.org a bit more
interesting and attractive to visit in particular for recurring users.

Hopefully the above idea is understandable. I am not sure how
useful it may be, but making rubygems.org more useful in general
is, I think, a good idea.