Yeah if anything, I found Twitter TOO addicting. Whether you have an interest in stats, finance, basketball, politics, tech, deep learning, mathematics... you'll find an industry leader who has an active account. Writers (journalists, authors) are especially active on the platform which makes for some rather interesting leads to things to look at.
I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.
I tried to go this route before I abandoned it altogether. I found 3 problems with this.
First, switching contexts between subjects I'm deeply interested in was exhausting. I need categories, or even different accounts to group them.
Second, my borderline OCD has a hard time not reading everything, so I wound up curating my list of follows to "reasonable" accounts,and not spammy one that post every few minutes and take over the feed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of those.
Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened. I'm sure I was buried in their feeds, even if my response was worth a reply.
"Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened."
So I was going to reply pointing out how this is impossible. No single person can address the stream of hundreds or thousands of people who want to reply and/or ride your coattails to Twitter fame.
When it occurred to me there's a decent opportunity here for someone who wants a machine learning project; given a stream of replies to a tweet from a celebrity, what's the 3 most popular questions/sentiments being expressed? (Or whatever number.) After a while, even a human secretary wouldn't be able to perform that function, it just gets to be so much, but you can't tire a machine.
Twitter's got the data streams you need already.
Of course, it still isn't necessarily going to satisfy you from the individual questioner's point of view, but maybe you feel like it at least contributed to the stream.
Very much in agreement with your second point. Interesting people tend to post a lot, not just to "spam" but because they like the media; but then they drown the feed.
There should be a way to throttle heavy posters / group their posts.
Agreed on the content and interesting articles... I just find it overwelming... I'll hop on twitter when I want to post something I may appreciate later, reach out to a company to praise or complain, or just because sometimes... however, I'll spend who knows how long reading through the backlog, and only touch the surface of what's been posted since I last looked.
The people I really care more about hearing from get drowned out, and the rest, while interesting is less so... and twitter's attempts at promoting populist articles on top exacerbates the issue, at least for me. I liked it better where I mostly saw the most recent stuff on top. Not to mention their weird content filters, where certain posts just aren't even visible... sometimes when you're looking at your own timeline.
I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.