Yes, and it is addicting as any of the others. I quit Twitter and Bluesky a while ago, locked myself out of my Reddit account, but HN is one of the hardest that I found to rid of.
It isn't even close. Digg.com used to have it and so did reddit, but it degraded so much that they became unuseable.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.
Hah, same, this also grinds my gears!
Can those two sentences really live together? I mean, if you go hunting down content and more importantly discussions outside the homepage, isn't that some flavor of doomscrolling?
You could have HN for politics, or art and philosophy.