Subjective. I can't stand using it for some reason, and when I have to, I hate the experience. There's something I can't grasp that makes me want to stay away from it.
I salute those who have the stomach to sit in front of it for hours.
I much prefer a long read / deep dive written article because it's much more accessible. I can read at my own speed of comprehension (generally much faster than a video) and I can easily jump around without losing context.
But I'm not very typical I guess.
The insatiable desire to be up to date with current news, happenings in my fields of interest or social circles became unmanageable. Furthermore, the teams of people with doctorates employed by tech companies to make their product even stickier with each iteration made my battle all the more challenging.
By creating hard boundaries that were non-negotiable such as limiting time on the top (n) sites, banning certain apps on the phone and deleting accounts helped me immensely.
Being online is hard to avoid such as banking, portfolio management, booking medical appointments and acquiring entertainment to consume are now ingrained in modern society yet learning the skill (or art of) disconnecting to enjoy non-online or 'outside' activities and controlling my compulsion to surf aimlessly (laptop or mobile) from one site to the next took weeks to get under control.
Training my family and friends to not expect an instant reply to messages also took a long time and surprisingly difficult.
Today was a public holiday where I live and I'm happy to say I spent it offline. I did however listen to the news and the footy on the wireless. Only now in the late evening for 20 minutes am I replying to my messages and 'online'.
On Youtube it's mostly vacuous showmen like Linus tech tips and Mr Beast crap. I don't think there is much worth watching there except perhaps EEVBlog.
That's also the issue, isn't it? YouTube addiction feeds in the vacuum of not knowing what other activities one wants to do.
Doing nothing and don't know what you want to do? Maybe you open YouTube to fill the void. I know I do (even though much less nowadays).
When I need to take a break I just read random posts. Some of these posts are interesting to me and I might spend too much time drilling into them.
I am pretty sure that I would do the same in the absence of smartphones, but with a newspaper instead.
Video sites/apps never did anything for me, but I'd read text-only forums for hours and hours.
Ads are the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of content out there that doesn't look like an ad that has ulterior motives. Not all of it is nefarious, but there are way too many smart people working on such things to believe that not seeing an ad is equivalent to not being influenced by marketers.
And while they may differ on many topics, one thing marketing agrees on is that you should be engaging with as much marketing-influenced content as possible.
So returning to my "is it an addiction" question... Broadly speaking it's fairly obvious whose interests would be served, if not yours, by spending an unhealthy amount of time on HN. I'm sure it was a conversation at one time, back when someone was deciding whether or not to build HN. It serves ycombinator's interests to have us here.
I'm not saying it's necessarily problematic, especially in HN's case, but one does feel like a rat in a maze at times. You gotta wonder if there's a different way, one with fewer maze designers and more cheese.
So my point is that we could still have engaging information available without it being engineered for engagement. We could design instead with dopamine hygiene in mind. And that's a situation with less addiction potential.
Clickbait articles on other sites are mostly because of Google driving it anyways.
Perhaps we need to ban ads targeting children for starters, like we did smoking. Unfortunately with "ads", there is no easy "here look at this cancer-ridden black lung that was directly caused by smoking"-equivalent.
Better be extra worried then…
Edit: I love how the sentence above turned out without punctuation, especially the "left right" ending lol.