I have spent ridiculous amount of time in HN with 0 ads, pictures, notifications or anything related to engagement driving.

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.

Yeah me too. When I started using Internet, I spent hours and hours on usenet. Text only, not an ad in sight.

Sme here, usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Ars forums, HN.

Video sites/apps never did anything for me, but I'd read text-only forums for hours and hours.

Me too, but is it an addiction? Typically one would classify it as an addiction when it stops serving your interests.

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.

Well, reading blogs without any incentive to earn money is quite addictive too. Same for HN

Let’s call them by names, Google, Meta, Netflix, Tik Tok.

Clickbait articles on other sites are mostly because of Google driving it anyways.

if we go one layer deeper, perhaps we can attribute that to the fact that people just aren't willing to pay for stuff, which leads companies to have to figure out how to monetize their services. that road inevitably leads to ads as the simplest, easiest and most obvious solution.

I agree but I'd go a tad further: Why do Ads even work as a monetization strategy? Either we've collectively been convinced that paying for ads is valuable in some way, or that on some level they work at convincing people to spend. I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable.

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.

> I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable.

Better be extra worried then…

Just say cancer or AIDS, no need to use that much words

HN is pretty addictive for me - no ads on here!

There are plenty of posts here pushing a product aka advertising, even if the way they get to the front page isn't directly by the company giving money to YC.

Read their privacy policy. It makes sense not to have ads when you are incentivizing user's data