2. The content surfaced is on average interesting and satiating to a curious mind. There is both depth and breadth. Do you like politics? History? Deep technical studies? Science and medical research of all sorts? Take your pick (insert Bo Burnham "welcome to the Internet" here).
3. For those seeking that sort of opportunity, jobs are available with who's hiring threads, YC ads, and serendipitous job offers from HN interactions.
It's a virtual Soho House where membership is free and requires no referral but ongoing membership is up to how you behave.
(unapologetic HN addict)
But just like any addiction, there is diminishing returns to it and so it is likely best in small doses.
There is also the reward mechanism when finding a particular interesting tool or idea from the site such as recent launch of Github Co-pilot.
Since I check multiple times per day, I split posts by day and keywords to dramatically cut down on total visit time: hackerer.news
That's why I wrote a client that keeps track of titles I've seen and doesn't show them to me again.
I suspect very few people obsessively look at HN all day. The site doesn't have any inherently addictive quality, especially when compared to other social media platforms that actively try to steal time and attention. A few people might spend too much time scrolling through HN out of boredom or procrastination, they should ask themselves why they choose to do that rather than looking for something "addictive" about the site.
e-five