I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time.
In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so intense that the reactions to it permeate everything.
The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any tools to improve it.
I know a few hundred people in real life but I don't feel a need to call them all up every single day. Ditto for Twitter. I can follow a wide range of people and dip in and out of it, enjoy the variety, and move on. I'd want to read everyone's every tweet as little as I'd want to know every one of my acquaintance's thoughts every day..
The trick is that I don't treat Twitter as a newscast but as a stream of interesting thoughts to sample from when I have free time. I do keep a secret list of people who use Twitter to put out original work that I'll check from time to time but mostly I find that my general timeline has most of the interesting tweets in it anyway, because of how Twitter curates the top of it -- with the What-You-Might-Have-Missed, even if you have your timeline in chrono order.
For one, if I were to mute opinions that I disagreed with, I feel like I would be in effect turning a blind eye to the fact that people have these opinions. I don't see any value in this; people all over the world have all sorts of different opinions, and deluding myself into believing that people who disagree with me effectively don't exist seems... wrong, morally, at least to me. I specifically follow individuals (both public figures and not) whose opinions (political and otherwise) don't align with my own. I _want_ to see thoughts that aren't just identical to the ones already floating around in my head!
Also, I personally believe that associating emotions with words and phrases in the minds of the populace so strongly as to cause one to either react with outrage or reach for a digital mute/hide button, is one of the strongest weapons of social destruction today. This is a means of socially engineering people's reactions to specific ideas, conditioning them on a mass scale to be unable to use logic and reason as their emotions short-circuit any such thinking. Since mid-2016 I have gone to great lengths to refrain from becoming "outraged" by outrage-bait news and social media posts, and I've found that it's increased my personal happiness and outlook on life considerably, especially as the mass and social media ramp up their production of nigh-constant outrage fuel, and everyone seems to want to make _everything_ political.
Do you read every HN post? Much less should you feel the need to read every tweet.
For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.
There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed.
It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing.
Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).