>Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site

As with all discussions of whether something does or does not fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation. How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now; changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or not.

The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes entirely from how those categories are defined in the context of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions, we're all just talking past each other.

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.

I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.

I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.