Is the "hot network questions" element on Stack Overflow a dark pattern?

I asked a question on meta about hiding the "hot network questions" element on stackoverflow.com. One of the comment replies was that the "hot network questions" is basically a way for Stack Overflow to keep me on the site longer even to the point of distracting me from why I originally came here (to get an answer to a technical question/to answer technical questions and raise my stack score).

It is always in your eyeline, except on certain pages like settings/question formatting page with no way to disable it/modify it.

So if you think about it in that context, is it a dark pattern? In my opinion this is similar to a persuasive pattern that becomes a dark pattern when you take away user choice... similar to how Quora shows you other questions in the middle of reading answers to a question.

Edit(March 16th, 2019)Stack ended up adding the ability to remove HNQ- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325060/updating-the-hot-network-questions-list-now-with-a-bit-more-network-and-a-litt?cb=1