The difference is you can’t prove that hacker news has a bunch of psychologists on staff who are dreaming up ways to make the website addictive.

If you take TikTok to court and go through discovery you’re going to find internal communications of people talking about ways to get people to stay on the app longer, ways to make the content more addictive, ways to maximize ad reach, etc.

Hacker news just tossed a simple upvote downvote system and called it a day.

Plus it has no endless scroll, no graphics at all, limits your comment frequency, has no push notifications, etc.