So, you are just re-linking from news site which in turn have links to the actual content so you are leveraging TechCrunch/HackerNews to do a lot of pre-sorting for you - assuming you link to the actual site of course and not HackerNews or TechCrunch - because that would give away your source and make your twittering a bit more useless.
This is my number one reason to avoid twitter: it is just all re-tweets of re-tweets of news sites and almost never any unique, REAL content. It's all just a huge noise floor.
If I want interesting articles without having to wait for someone to twitter it, I'll just follow one of the countless news sites out there - no need to wait for your tweeting and it will benefit the site and community of that site - not just a single person trying to promote themselves by trying to show how they follow the latest news.
My Twitter feed has almost none of this "RT's of news sites" stuff going on. I will let you in on my secret: I unfollow people who do that. I unfollow maybe one person every other month now.
Twitter isn't "all just a huge noise floor". It's pretty much whatever you make of it. I agree, this person has made of it a pretty crappy ad-hoc news aggregator.
Between "RTs of news sites", "I am having a bagel" and absolutely shameless self promoting plugs I just came to the misanthropic conclusion of twitter = noise.
I know such generalizations are unfair and a bit closed minded... I can't help it, I am just a bit stuck in the pre "web 2.0" 90s/2000 internet and can sometimes only shake my head at some of those hypes and what's going on these days.
But I digress and you are right, I should give it another try and see what I could actually get out of it.
This is my number one reason to avoid twitter: it is just all re-tweets of re-tweets of news sites and almost never any unique, REAL content. It's all just a huge noise floor.
If I want interesting articles without having to wait for someone to twitter it, I'll just follow one of the countless news sites out there - no need to wait for your tweeting and it will benefit the site and community of that site - not just a single person trying to promote themselves by trying to show how they follow the latest news.