I think it's also an effect of the way most Twitter users interact with the feed. I've used Tweetbot for years, and other clients that only show the timeline in order before that, and I'm pretty religious about clearing out people who only post annoying/only political/negative content on their feeds.

I've found it to be a great place for feedback on my own work and also for finding new things, but I also instinctively filter out about 90% of what I see even in my own curated listing that I browse.

Every once in a while I get to Twitter.com and see how the algorithmic feed lays things out, and the experience would be a disaster, like with Facebook.