Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content. Instagram/Snapchat is the same, except now the comments are pictures with a whole lot of body shaming thrown in.
Much of it, yes. But 1) tailor your Twitter stream to your (professional) interests, 2) ignore any trending news, 3) unfollow people who tweet random stuff or have too much Trump (or any current politics) in their mix and it will provide useful. I follow mostly computational neuroscience / machine learning scientists, and have heard much about recent research, summary articles or conferences first on Twitter. On an evening just two weeks ago I glanced at my list and saw a poster about one of the most intriguing research findings I've yet seen. Without Twitter I would have had to attend the conference or waited for the paper. Science Twitter is active and growing, and as scientists are busy people for many it has become a popular and low-effort announcement platform for new work (much better than university blogs or press releases and such).
I see much more toxicity glancing on any video's YouTube comments than on my Twitter stream.
Maybe Twitter should just let you filter posts based on content. (Maybe it's already possible, I'm not a big Twitter user.)
A future feature I would like to see in social networks is automatically generating tags for posts and letting people filter out the posts based on that.
With that, I can just choose an automatically generated US politics filter for example and not have to maintain a mute list.
This is by far the best, most succinct description of Twitter I've ever heard. Love it. Keeping this one and requoting it forever, thank you