It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.
Then 2016 happened and the greater half decided they were really closet political pundits all along. Now I don't read Twitter at all.
Spend some time each month pruning follower bots and unfollow the accounts that were once interesting but monetise themselves.
It's a bit of effort but for niche science/engineering/software stuff it's actually quite useful to see. Especially science/astronomy.
I look at it as a ”legal” drug. Take too much and you are fucked. In moderation and taken with care it's actually quite cathartic.
It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.
Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.
When it comes to the actual work though she spend 99% of her time at the library, archives, prison, or on the phone with sources.
That doesn't make it sound very enticing for the average user.
Particularly in machine learning it seems like thousands of papers are published every week, impossible to sort through. I find that the few I see people talking about on Twitter are the most interesting and worthy of attention.
Here's a list I made a while ago of the machine learning people I follow: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/b6dwrd/d_b...
For me and many others it is a place where we can share what we consider beautiful and sacred, what we find compelling and carefully thought. It is an agora shimmering with such things.
Even though much of the good web has retreated to private spaces like email lists and secret slacks, I am in some of those things because someone was able to find me on Twitter.
(And yeah we all need to vent, and have our human bouts of melancholy. But if you use twitter solely to participate in the negative, you are really missing out!)