[walterbell]

Lists are the way to go.

Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

[jonathansizz]

Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on the user's part.