I don't think so. The signal to noise ratio here is much higher than on typical social media. It's self policing and there are rewards (karma) for good behavior that are absent on most social media. HN to me feels more like early Usenet newsgroups than it does something like Facebook.
I appreciate that the ego-factor is very low here. No profiles, no avatars, no 'mentioning' of other people, just the author name of a comment, that's it.
Also - hn doesn't center around people, but around topics. That changes the whole thing.
