HN skips many of the dark patterns that other social medias have:
- no infinite scroll (you have to click on "More") - no personal recommendation - no feedback loop between your upvotes and the feed - no messaging or following between users
HN looks a lot more like news groups from back in the days.
The comment threads are basically "infinite scroll". They're paginated once they hit 500 or something. Scanning a SM post takes 2 seconds, HN comments much longer.
Its not the pagination that matters, it is the lack of a feed that you can keep scrolling. The front page is paginated at 30.
Longer comments are a good thing.