Beer mode is extremely important to me: it's how I discover new ideas serendipitously. Twitter is a great place for beer mode activities, but it's also a toxic cesspool full of shitposting and virtue signaling. It's entertaining, exhausting, and distracting.

Fortunately, there are a small number of users who consistently post great content focused on an area that I'm interested in. They are, essentially, "professional tweeters". Or, if you prefer terms from a bygone era, they are micro-bloggers.

You can configure tweetdeck, which is the only Twitter client you should use, as it lets you configure exactly how you want to view tweets and you can remove the algorithmic timeline (and ads) from it entirely. At first, I configured tweetdeck to follow individual users which worked great and cut down the noise considerably.

But I still saw replies from those users. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's really random when you see it in a column as the context isn't really there. I really prefer starting from the top of a thread and then seeing any replies that they may be making to other users on their thread. The trick that I learned to do this is to create search columns instead of user columsn. You just need to use this format for the advanced search syntax:

from:user_name -filter:replies

That's it! Here's a screenshot of how this looks in tweetdeck #