I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it.
Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.
Selection criteria I use:
- don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day
- sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam
- select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")
Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):
Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller (https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number.
I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost entirely stopped using Facebook (outside of events/messaging) and strictly used Twitter. It's a fun place to share programming thoughts and discuss things with people.
For the most part I've been able to share links and chime into discussions with people whom's work I'm interested in and keep the discussion around economics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. I follow roughly the same rule as you - I look at the tweet frequency and then dig into actual tweets. I've actually made a couple friends in the Elixir community through Twitter which is actually fun.
The last thing I would recommend is to use lists. @patrickc's reading list is probably one of the best things I follow, as well as @pmarca's press list. You can actually check out the lists I follow as well.
It did take a lot of time, because there's hardly any automation. I largely built it from piggy backing: the following lists of the intellectual Twitter elite: e.g. @balajis @naval @cdixon @juliagalef are fertile hunting grounds!
My usage is similar but I follow about twice the number of people. To keep things manageable i.e. consume twitter in about 30 minutes/day, I wrote a small chrome extension to rearrange my feed (sort by likes/retweets, give different weights to users and sort the feed/list).
That is an absolutely fabulous list! I took the time to follow each one manually. I was surprised to recognize at least 25% of the names from off Twitter.
Annoyingly, Twitter doesn't let you view that list without logging in. It's possible to browse tweets by individuals without logging in, or even many individuals given a collection of names, but viewing the list? Not in my garden, pal.
I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"
I didn't know about lists(not a hardcore Twitter user) until this thread then I went to check it out.
First thought was, great feature, but I had the same issue with batch editing, then I tried using lists through Tweetdeck and it is much easier to create lists, remove & add profiles to each list, Twitter might actually become useful for me with this.
I get that. Twitter has a lot of usability imperfections. Lists is one, but I still use them. Anywhere from 0 - 200 people, depending on how much they post, is about the maximum I can handle in any one stream. So I segregate into lists. I see you have about 400 people you follow, which would overwhelm me if they were all in my main feed.
Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.
Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")
Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):
https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following