You can choose to see it as a revealed preference or you can call it unhinged addiction.
I am in the “unhinged addiction” camp.
We create and shape markets by defining the rules. As an example the supposedly free NYSE will stop trading if a stock is going down a certain percentage points in a day.
I can tell you that getting off social networks was a hell of a lot easier than getting off nicotine (i still haven't succeeded with the latter, to be honest).
Like, the hyperbole associated with social networks just astounds me. They are just websites. They have been carefully engineered to be addictive, like many other services, but there's nobody at Facebook coming round to people's houses and forcing them to open the app.
I actually think that social media is addictive because people like talking to other people, and these tools facilitate this.
Is HN addictive? Is it more like heroin than the NYT?
You are essentially arguing for a social internet without filtering and search engines. Lots of people claim to want this, but the fact that no platform lets you do this leads me to believe that the revealed preferences of people are different.