Guess HN needs to banned then. Their news feed is designed to exploit my need for novelty and it works. I'm here far more than I should be. I guess I should expect the government to regulate HN to save me from it's exploitative patterns
I don't see it to be honest. The website is plain and simple, downvotes are capped, the scores are not visible. I spent significantly less time here than on other forms of social media, and I never feel glued to the website.
What part of the HN design appears to you exploitative? It's much more like an old school web forum than a gamified social website.
This will only be a temporary issue which will disappear with the generation which will resist the most. Most behavioural changes and changes to the norm just need to wait until the first generation dies out and to all subsequent generations this will be the only norm they ever knew. A great example is smoking in public places in Europe. The people who think this restricts their freedom is slowly disappearing. Most young people and new generations find it normal that smoking in public places is prohibited and they would resist if someone was to try to change that now.
It definitely sounds odd to my younger colleagues when I explain what it was like when people smoked in pubs by default.
There may be a difference here in that lots of people disliked smoking/smokers/their clothes smelling after going to a pub, perhaps more than there are who dislike the concept of facebook likes manipulating their behaviour more than they like the rewards that likes bring them.