I wasn't there in the beginning but, as I understand it the original pracftice with Twitter was a) pushing posts into the public timeline for publishing stuff to share (accepting that some of this could be promotional) b) @replies to comment on a post and share it with followers and D for conversations.

It seems those conventions were nicely thought out, balancing the interests of the public, friends and followers.

Since then, perhaps because of these auto DM tools, the whole thing has become confused and a lot of conversations are conducted with @replies.  The effect of this is my Twitter is now swamped by public posts by people I'm following and by @replies in conversations I'm not involved.

On an individual basis this is fine of course, but when my Twitter gets swamped by a combination of the same posts made by the same people on a daily basis and also by @replies in conversations I'm not involved, the whole thing turns into noise.

And ultimately noise gets ignored, at which point Twitter and anything else, for that matter, degenerates into just another way of creating links to attract the search engines.

Have I got this completely wrong?  How do people with thousands of friends and followers cope?

Is there any conclusion other than ultimately the Internet ruins everything, not because of the technology but because of ways we use it indiscriminately.