I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point you see stuff like Agner Fog's work, LWN, or a number of other minimalist websites and realize that a website that is popular despite the lack of overindulgence in UI must be popular because of the content. It doesn't hurt that the best courses in my university experience have had websites that have not changed much since the late 1990s (one did change the lime green text on turquoise background on their page after the recession to a color scheme that didn't cause headaches in students).

I do find that my peers that now read HN used to be judicial about curating a Reddit feed and mostly otherwise limited on other sources. Short-form content is addictive and as nearly as unavoidable as sugar, but many of my brighter peers work on reducing that intake. Long-form YouTube is also something I find to be a marker of someone who is seeking knowledge. Many of my peers do scroll Twitter and TikTok all day, but I find that those who are easiest to chat with are those who have already scrolled HN today and want to discuss a particular article they know I would have seen. I've had conversations that start with "Did you see that TikTok?" and conversations that start with "Did you see that article on HN?" and the latter is always more engaging.