It is, but it is way harder to self-promote yourself and derive other than intellectual satisfaction. It was not purposely built as a platform for advertising and branding like social networks.

You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.

What do you mean? Every post and comment can receive upvotes, your account has total upvotes, the dopamine hit is there when you can simply look at the top of the screen next to your username and see the number go up after posting. There's even rewards if you make the number go high enough, such as being able to downvote and flag stuff once you reach a certain level.

I was under the impression that HN is at least as centered on self-promotion as any other social media site.

> You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.

There’s a score displayed at the top right; I’m 100% that some percentage of visitors get a dopamine hit off that.