I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.

I learn stuff on HN every time I visit. Reddit is (somewhat) entertaining, but I don’t usually learn anything important there.

> Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms

Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?

I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink.

A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.

I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.

I do it as I would otherwise be playing video games. If I have a big project going on, I’ll ignore Reddit and Hacker News for weeks.

I also learn a lot of new stuff.

I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things.

I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.