I’m clearly addicted, but does HN have any sort of algorithm designed to maximize my time on it?
I’m sure these companies do everything in their power to make their services more addictive, however we have to consider that this is just looking for a scapegoat.
"Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
Go look at something such as a phpbb site where topic ordering is driven solely by 'bumps' - the most recent topic to have a comment gets bumped to the top of the page listing. You'll find they rarely have any worse ordering of content than voting systems provide. In my opinion it tends to be simply superior. It also avoids the huge problem in point based systems of requiring some 'parallel universe' /new stream that only a tiny and biased minority ever view.
But voting systems drive "engagement." One intuitively surprising discovery is that downvoting users tends to drive them to comment more, frequently with lower quality posts following. I say 'intuitively surprising' because it seems counter intuitive, yet if you've spent any time on point driven message boards, including here, you see the constant stream of little tit-for-tats as a downvoted user (or two) engage in an ever lower quality of 'debate' in some isolated thread. As for upvotes it goes without saying that that little micro-shot of dopamine is what's built, and arguably sustaining, the social platforms of today.
As for bump-ordering, I lost most of my youth to phpbb-like forums, and I'd say they foster a mindset of even more obsessive interaction because not only do non-nested threads become impossible to follow if you're away for long enough, but keeping your preferred topics on the front page requires frequent monitoring and carefully-timed comments.
You mean like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129671 which directly links to the 'parent' of your comment and is formatted almost exactly like a 'Ask HN' post?
HN, like reddit, optimizes for engagement using the post ranking algorithm.
that upvotes are visible to the user is a big one. Hackernews (or reddit for that matter, which employs a similar mechanism), would work just as well for the purpose of conversation if your score was hidden.
But seeing that number next to your name climb up is something that drives a lot of engagement on the platform. I don't think this is intentional on HN's part, but on Reddit for example I have no doubt that the activity generated by the 'karma' mechanism is left in place precisely because it generates so much (meaningless) content.
Even email can be habitual. Stop sending them and - sans spam and newletters - you stop getting emails.
It's too easy to be addict today.