Yes definitely. Again, audience and interests are different, but they are social media. Funny (sadly?) enough as a teenager I discovered IRC and was absolutely

Yes definitely. Again, audience and interests are different, but they are social media. Funny (sadly?) enough as a teenager I discovered IRC and was absolutely addicted and for a good 1.5 years spent every minute I could on IRC. I would use IRC at the school library between classes, at community college, at family friends' houses, in my own house, etc. We were poor at home but despite that I literally used any possible internet connected terminal to connect to IRC (and its resilience as a protocol made that really easy.) I had poor impulse control at that age but I do remember IRC a lot, and not in the most healthy way. Also interestingly enough text-based social media (HN, Reddit, Bluesky, X) addict me way more than video based ones (like Tiktok, Youtube, or Instagram) do. I don't know if it's because it takes longer to digest the information through video than text but I do know that I have no problem with looking at pictures and videos and stopping for days/weeks, but once I get hooked on text it's really hard to stop. I even spent a year in middle school addicted to reading books though I had other things going on in my life at the time and books were a bit of an escape. I've had waves of HN addiction and definitely enjoy X and Bluesky because of the textual media of the experience. As an adult I mostly grew out of these addictions but I can still feel their pull on me. Luckily I have enough going on in my offline life that digital life takes a backseat. If you want to think of these in terms of "algorithms", then IRC and Usenet have a simple "chronological" algorithm to display posts while Reddit and HN use an "upvote" based engagement algorithm. X and more "modern" social networks may use more sophisticated algorithms but they're all just algorithms to return a sorted order of items.