Yeah if anything, I found Twitter TOO addicting. Whether you have an interest in stats, finance, basketball, politics, tech, deep learning, mathematics... you'll find an industry leader who has an active account. Writers (journalists, authors) are especially active on the platform which makes for some rather interesting leads to things to look at.

I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.

I tried to go this route before I abandoned it altogether. I found 3 problems with this.

First, switching contexts between subjects I'm deeply interested in was exhausting. I need categories, or even different accounts to group them.

Second, my borderline OCD has a hard time not reading everything, so I wound up curating my list of follows to "reasonable" accounts,and not spammy one that post every few minutes and take over the feed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of those.

Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened. I'm sure I was buried in their feeds, even if my response was worth a reply.

"Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened."

So I was going to reply pointing out how this is impossible. No single person can address the stream of hundreds or thousands of people who want to reply and/or ride your coattails to Twitter fame.

When it occurred to me there's a decent opportunity here for someone who wants a machine learning project; given a stream of replies to a tweet from a celebrity, what's the 3 most popular questions/sentiments being expressed? (Or whatever number.) After a while, even a human secretary wouldn't be able to perform that function, it just gets to be so much, but you can't tire a machine.

Twitter's got the data streams you need already.

Of course, it still isn't necessarily going to satisfy you from the individual questioner's point of view, but maybe you feel like it at least contributed to the stream.

Very much in agreement with your second point. Interesting people tend to post a lot, not just to "spam" but because they like the media; but then they drown the feed.

There should be a way to throttle heavy posters / group their posts.

You can have categories (or rather - lists) on Twitter.

Agreed on the content and interesting articles... I just find it overwelming... I'll hop on twitter when I want to post something I may appreciate later, reach out to a company to praise or complain, or just because sometimes... however, I'll spend who knows how long reading through the backlog, and only touch the surface of what's been posted since I last looked.

The people I really care more about hearing from get drowned out, and the rest, while interesting is less so... and twitter's attempts at promoting populist articles on top exacerbates the issue, at least for me. I liked it better where I mostly saw the most recent stuff on top. Not to mention their weird content filters, where certain posts just aren't even visible... sometimes when you're looking at your own timeline.

I've tried to follow a few "industry leaders" but in the end it is all way too shallow on twitter to be useful.

What twitter looks like to me, is a way to follow and appreciate brands, to tap into their stream of consciousness, to experience the themness in a way that just has no appeal to me whatsoever, and it goes a little deeper than I don't care what Taco Bell or Justin Bieber thinks.

There is no brand/person that I find so "interesting" that I would want to "follow" them. Whilst I do have a twitter account, I used it to log into an airport wifi once; I don't follow anyone I don't know.

I even find the word "follow" uncomfortable, maybe even an anathema, as it suggests that I'm not as good as they are, and yet another something to confirm their brand celebrity.

Now I appreciate not everyone is trying to be a brand on twitter, and if someone could have multiple channels I could subscribe to, then I might be able to monitor someone's business world (but of course, I have LinkedIn), my family and friends' pictures (which are all on Facebook or Google+), and even seek advice for things to do and places to eat (like on Yelp, but just kidding, I use Facebook for this as well), all inside Twitter, but that's simply not how it's set up.

Indeed, the only suitable use seems to be the thing I have no interest in whatsoever.

So maybe I just don't understand how twitter can be interesting or useful, but if it is just another celebrity/gossip magazine, or some kind of entertainment news/television replacement, then it's stagnation shouldn't be surprising: There are plenty of players in this space, and there will be another.

I used to do the same (I've used it since 2009 for the exact same reason). At some point though, that gets old, you hear too much noise and blabber and realize you're voicing your @ replies and thoughts in a vacuum. Nobody is listening (and I have about 1500 followers). The ones who have a voice on Twitter have become too vocal over time.

I prefer RSS - twitter is too chaotic for my taste.

Today's iteration of social networks won because they are feed readers for the masses. Facebook and Twitter have completely obliterated RSS and in many cases, Facebook has even supplanted the need for an independent website. A lot of local businesses have a Facebook page that they use as their primary web page.

I was about to say the same thing. People keep wanting Twitter to be Facebook.