How can one separate the inherent addictiveness of social approval (which we evolved to cope with) from the added addictiveness due to slot-machine rewards? (D

How can one separate the inherent addictiveness of social approval (which we evolved to cope with) from the added addictiveness due to slot-machine rewards? (Discrete measures of approval, like a count of Likes, add their own variance in addition to the inherent variability of how much people liked something. That discretization is a property of the digital system, and adds the variance of a binomial distribution.) So when you say something IRL, you can gauge a lot of fine gradations of approval in the way people react. But online, where you get a small count of upvotes, the quantization adds variance and makes it more addictive. The added variance is most significant at small sample sizes. People whose submissions get hundreds of votes might find the process less addictive than people whose submissions get a handful of votes. Would HN be less addictive if the upvote process was more analog, somehow? Say, by adding up the duration people held down the mouse button for?