To be very cynical, HN isn’t a nonprofit we all donate to either: it’s the wholly funded pet project of an organization who teaches growth and engagement (and in fact from what I hear is quite strict with its companies on expected monthly growth rate)

That HN is a thoughtful garden unconcerned with the ugliness of ads and growth targets is also unsurprising to me, in the same way that a lot of open source and other charitable giving comes from companies who are already comfortably profitable.

Enthusiasm for HN while bemoaning other less addictive social platforms suggests the complaint is more about content or business model or something like that, than attention / engagement / addiction per se.