Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller (https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number.

I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost entirely stopped using Facebook (outside of events/messaging) and strictly used Twitter. It's a fun place to share programming thoughts and discuss things with people.

For the most part I've been able to share links and chime into discussions with people whom's work I'm interested in and keep the discussion around economics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. I follow roughly the same rule as you - I look at the tweet frequency and then dig into actual tweets. I've actually made a couple friends in the Elixir community through Twitter which is actually fun.

The last thing I would recommend is to use lists. @patrickc's reading list is probably one of the best things I follow, as well as @pmarca's press list. You can actually check out the lists I follow as well.

https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/lists

I think for the most part, like you Max, if you try to keep it small - it works great.