I follow ~200 extremely high quality people on twitter, never use the algorithmic timeline -- just the "Following" tab, and it is easily 10x more signal to noise than HN for me, I'm almost upset I didn't start using it sooner.

Only works if you can resist the temptation to follow national news orgs, politics, etc. In my little niche, though, I essentially never see any of that, even less than one sees on HN. It's all just tech, AL/ML, space/rockets, startups, etc.

social media is much worse than TV though