How do people actually find trends before they go viral?

I’ve always been curious about how creators catch trends early.

By the time something shows up on “trend dashboards”, it’s usually already everywhere.

Most viral formats seem to follow a weird path across the internet:

Reddit → Twitter/X → niche communities → TikTok / Instagram

By the time it reaches Instagram, it’s already saturated.

So I started building a small experiment to track early signals of these patterns instead of engagement spikes.

It’s here:
https://trends.eonik.ai

The idea is simple:

Instead of showing what’s already viral, try to surface formats and ideas that are starting to spread across communities.

Not sure if it’s actually useful yet.

Curious about how others do this.

How do you personally spot trends early?

Is it:

• scrolling Reddit
• niche Discords
• Twitter/X
• creator communities
• something else?

Would love to understand how people actually do this today.