I'd rather follow 1000 elephants with a broom and a bucket.
Man, I love you, you know that, but... Wow. 1000 people? A life. Get one of your own. No one needs to read 140 character snippets from the brains of that many people, most of which you do not know and never will. How do you have that much time in a day? (That is not a rhetorical question - I really want to know...)
I follow like 40 people IF that, and I know many of them personally. I appreciate only the choicest of witty tweets, and almost always block retweets (other than AU athletics ones). I will try some of the ones you and weskie recommended, but after a little bit, if I am not amused? He gone. Life's too short.
Decade differences, I guess. I'm not a different generation, technically, but sometimes I feel like it. Now get off my lawn...
I'm currently following 1,551. When I see a new interesting account, I add them.
No one says you have to read every single tweet in your timeline.
You're thinking about it wrong if you think you do.
When I hit refresh, I'll see something guaranteed to be new and fresh while it might be 30 minutes between individual tweets on yours. If I'm stuck in an elevator or something where I'd otherwise be bored out of my mind, by the time I've read everything since the refresh picks up and I get to the top, I hit refresh again and there's a whole new set of entertainment. I get different perspectives on things going on. See different jokes by different people on whatever the current event of the minute is.
I don't follow random regular Joes. Of the 393 people that follow me, I probably follow less than 100 back, because they're completely uninteresting regular people who offer little less than retweets to things I already see from the original source or some mundane bullshit about what they had to eat that day. That's not what Twitter's for. I follow back the ones I know or ones that are funny and interesting or informative or relevant to my interests. It's not like Facebook. Think of it as a news source primarily. The more you follow, the more you are made aware of.
I mostly follow comedians, comedy writers, sportswriters, athletes (Never high school. Rarely current college players. All they offer is generic #RiseAndGrind and shit like that), satirists, musicians and bands I like, politicians and pundits I either like or am fascinated by, news sites, restaurants, bars, and breweries I like, accounts for festivals that go on around New Orleans, etc. I follow people who have funny or insightful things to say about Auburn, the Saints, politics, general things going on in New Orleans, things going on in Birmingham, beer, bacon, titties, tech, and whatever else I may read and say "Hm. Didn't know that was going on." or "Hm. That's an interesting take."