Size plays a huge and underappreciated role here. Hacker News is small enough that if you wanted to you could read the comments on everything that interested yo

Size plays a huge and underappreciated role here. Hacker News is small enough that if you wanted to you could read the comments on everything that interested you from the first two or three pages every day. It might take you an hour or so, depending on how many interests you have. Probably not worth your time, but not debilitating either. Metafilter is sort of an experiment of taking this to its logical extreme: anyone on the site (IIRC) is allowed to post directly to the front page, but you're a member of the community and expected to post thoughtful stuff that's going to be worth the time of most site members. Most social media platforms do the exact opposite, and intentionally at that. The whole point is that there's (practically) no end to how much you can consume, you can ruin your life on one site alone. Notably, HN and Metafilter don't have ads, but the incentives are clearly very different for almost any other social network.