I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)
The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).
Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.
I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area.
Those are more likely to keep their Twitter feed focused on their research, rather than off-topic tweets, rants, political advocacy and "influencer" stuff people do once they become famous.
Also, the community of people who engage with them tend to be similarly focused, so you can find more high S:N folks to follow in their discussions.
If you curate your Twitter feed to just those types, you get a very high S:N ratio there.
I've been doing the same (although I've actually been on a break from Twitter for over a year now). Care to share links to your lists?
BTW, it took me forever to realize that I didn't have to follow an account in order to put it in a list. I've been putting off a serious pruning (several thousand) of who I follow, and I wish there were better tools for doing that pruning.
Thanks for verbalizing it. I didn't notice how remarkable this was before you said it.
The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")
This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.
E.g. if someone versed in cryptography upvotes or downvotes a cryptography story/comment, that counts for more than someone random
And I only care because the expertise gap is really the only flaw in HN/Reddit style ranking. In all other ways, it seems superior.
The New England Complex Systems Institute - https://necsi.edu/ (Twitter link at top right)
London Math Lab’s Ergodicity Economics group - https://ergodicityeconomics.com/ (Twitter feed in left column)
Any PI running a research project of interest to you at the Santa Fe Institute - https://www.santafe.edu/