It's not necessary to inject intentional latency in the manner the parent suggests via a rather extreme delay.

You can accomplish a lot of the same outcome by merely eradicating following feeds (that is, the combined stream of posts from users that you follow).

In the early days of Facebook when you had to manually visit user pages to see what was new with someone or what they were posting, it was dramatically lower velocity in terms of how fast bullshit would spread and how much content you could reasonably consume. It would reduce page views / content views spectacularly, by including just that little bit of time and labor cost to the consumption. People would focus that effort primarily on the users that really matter to them.

The social networks of course know this. They built the streams / feeds / walls for that reason, to turbocharge the addiction. They'll never give it up.