I don't think it's a bad thing, but the things that are easy to consume take time and don't provide much benefit. Nobody would say that spending a couple of hours reading a novel is a waste of time, but reading HN is probably not as good a use of time. (The difference, in my mind, is that reading edited long-form literature is going to help you write better, while reading a bunch of casual comments about the latest Internet Outrage isn't.)
Actually, pg says just this in his essay How to Do What You Love: "Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive."
I don't read books to "feel productive", I read them to take my mind somewhere else for a while. I don't get the whole "feeling productive" thing; if I'm being productive, I'm too focused on producing to feel anything.
