It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.
I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.
If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
Every time I’ve tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has been constant hassle to manage it.
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and how.
The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.
You can also create a list of people who you are consistently interested in hearing from.
However, I agree that you’re probably better off without Twitter. It’s a time sink.
How about leaving it at shutting down and be done with it.