Agreed. How a 160 character text service manages to bloat and provide less utility than something that STARTED as richer content (Facebook) is beyond me. I've tried for perhaps 10 yeas now and have never been able to make Twitter work for me.
I decided last year that after 10 years, I would figure out how to get something out of twitter, and what I've found is that it really became a useful tool for me by the time I was following around 300 people, and had curated joke and garbage accounts out.
What I have now is a bunch of people in my own industry (music twitter, tech twitter), a bunch of people in industries I'm tangentially related to (Game dev twitter, vis-art twitter), a bunch of individual journalists, but by and large not the accounts of the publications they belong to, as well as the senators and congresspersons from my state.
By keeping a realtime stream of the people I follow in my periphery, I know when something is interesting when the list moves faster than normal, and if I feel like paying attention to it, the list moves quickly enough normally that there's a steady stream of real-time thoughts from people that I care about, and it doesn't move too quickly to read them.
The biggest thing I had to get over early on was wanting to read everything. Twitter's timeline isn't particularly legible if you want to go through and read everything your friends have written, but that's not how most people are really using it in my experience. People are checking in, seeing what's buzzing, and participating in the conversation if they have something to say.
That was the next big hurdle that I'm trying to get over now: Twitter is a participatory thing. You get more out of it if you start engaging with people. Twitter is so obtuse though, that it took my getting in to Mastodon to realize this.
You can talk to the void all you want, but if you want people to find /you/, you have to start talking to people.
I use it in a similar way. I follow ~400 mostly in my fields and fields I am interested in, with a heavy emphasis on accounts who post mostly text (as well as a few exceptional photographers). I unfollow or mute accounts that start posting animated gifs, memes, or clickbait.
One difference, however: I hardly ever use the Twitter Web interface anymore because of its algorithm that seems to emphasize yesterday's news and bury the stuff from people that I want to see. Tweetdeck's home feed is a godsend - just reverse-chron and no ads (yet).
Tangential rant: LinkedIn's feed has become a cesspool of clickbait and low-value "news" articles, as the algorithm prioritizes those posts which link to articles with photos. There are sometimes good text discussions sparked by people like Jason Fried, but 90%+ of the posts in my feed feature stock photography, company logos, and headshots of the titans of industry.
Oh, yeah- I only ever use the Twitter website to manage my notifications. Tweetbot on OSX and Flamingo on Android are my gotos.
Also, LinkedIn is terrible, and has been for the entire duration of my experience with it. I recently discovered that someone had tried to contact me about something extremely important using the LinkedIn messaging service, so now I feel somewhat obligated to follow it, and trying to navigate it was physically painful for me. I'm deeply upset that it's been made a necessary part of my life.
