The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.