It's not the same. Twitter is designed to constantly pump content and social engagement at you. Once you start scrolling on Twitter, it takes some effort to put it down.

HN is designed to show you 30 "trending" stories at a time, and its refresh rate is pretty slow compared to social media like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. From personal experience, it's pretty easy to load up HN, read a handful of stories/comment threads, and close it. With Twitter, I utilize iOS's built in app blocking features to lock me out of Twitter after 30 minutes. Without that restriction, I have a hard time getting off Twitter on my own.

Twitter, Facebook, etc. seem a lot more personal to me where it's easy to get wrapped up in the minutia of other peoples' lives. In contrast, HN is a feed of articles with comments on the specific topic and strong moderation to keep it that way. The latter may be "social media" but not like the former.

In a technical sense. It lacks the complexity and dark patterns that define what we commonly referred to as Social Media

HN! I enjoy it but very oftem wate much time reading all those comments!