I've all but given up social media elsewhere on the web, HN is one of my last holdouts, and I would argue that's it's more of a forum than classic social media.

HN does not engage in nefarious methods of keeping you engaged. It does not send you alerts telling you about what you've missed, it does not curate the home page to place you in your own personal echo chamber. These for me are it's strengths.

However, like any large social gathering, there will always be people whose views you cannot stand, and people who you feel closely aligned to, and this is healthy.

Whenever I see comment threads spiralling into toxic views I simply click away to another thread. For every bad comment section there will always be another good one. The key thing is, as a user I drive how I consume HN, not the other way around.

I may not be the original target demographic for HN and I've certainly not had any more than my 5 minutes of fame here, but I still find myself coming for the posts, and staying for the comments.