I don't consider HN to be in the same category of most social media apps, though it has some of the danger zones. There's a Hacker News Demetricifier extension that helps a lot with "oooh, let's see how many upvoties my wise, intelligent comment got this time!" checking.

I draw the line at "algorithmic, individualized feeds." To the best of my knowledge, HN state is global (to within whatever level of distributed consensus is required for the server infrastructure). If I look at HN, what I see in terms of front page state and comment order is what other people see, and what non-logged-in users see. It's not optimized for what the algorithm things I want to see - and that's the difference.

There are still plenty of dark patterns one can integrate within this space, and I think Reddit is in a very grey zone (I no longer use it because I don't like what the new interface has done to technical text content and their pending IPO or whatever is certain to ruin what's left). The only real improvement I'd offer to HN is the ability to hide your own comment upvote/downvote comments as a check toggle somewhere, to demetricify it even more, while still maintaining the ability to moderate content. That comment scores other than your own is hidden is a great improvement.

If there's a better line, I'd be interested in hearing it, but my personal point is "individualized, algorithmic feeds are evil."

A news aggregator with a heavily-modded comments section frequented by interesting, educated people is hardly the same as a platform that drives engagement to attract advertisers by crassly exploiting our basest human desires. Social media platforms are basically systems that front conversion funnels with image macros and pictures of butts. Hacker News' goal is to inspire thoughtful discourse.