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):