Here's perhaps a new way to think about social media. Let's focus on one particular aspect of "not noise": news.
Twitter is a powerful tool for collecting/spreading real time news. It also has many disadvantages, as we all know.
We have wikinews and other real-time information sources in our project (including real-time edits to pages during big events, such as the Olympics or Dancing With The Stars).
Why can't we work on integrating these better, so that when you are an eyewitness with first-hand knowledge contributing to WikiNews is at least as powerful/useful as tweeting? Perhaps integrating twitter and flow (or something even more radical) to make this work really well.
If people either get in the habit of using wikinews instead of twitter and/or wikinews becomes a powerful place to collect and filter tweets on a topic (think of https://storify.com/ for inspiration), we can further our educational goals, provide a "trusted" source for news that can be edited/vetted/archived and eliminate the echo chamber of misinformation which plagues twitter and facebook. We also help produce new editors who are generating content for our sites in the process of documenting and vetting first-hand sources during important events.
In my view, this is a more radical radical to think about social media. Not blindly trying to increase a "number of shares" metric, but trying to make our project an integral part of how the fact-based social experience works.
Ideally, this integration with real-time content would be bidirectional: real-time sources can be seamlessly incorporated into wikipedia articles where appropriate, and in the other direction quoting and sharing relevant wikipedia articles (or wikisource or wikiversity content, etc) in conversations in your extended social network would be facilitated for answering questions/filling in context/settling bar bets. This starts to look more like a wikipedia-enabled twitter client (or a twitter-enabled wikipedia) than a set of share icons. --scott