It's interesting how HN crowd are mostly text (and text with low formatting too!) consumers. Compared to other social media, and even old school forums...
Are we mostly l33t developers here, in love with CLI and Vim? Ha!
They were still forums. And there were some graphical usenet clients that were arguably better than any web forum - 35 years latter and much better graphics toolkits exist today. similiarly, not all bbses were text basee, though with modem being so slow that was the default.
Same reason I never click on YouTube links from friends: I find it annoying to have to wait to find out if I'm interested or not. On the other hand, I'll click on any non-video link someone sends me to have a look.