That's not really the case, as can been seen by the hate given to both FB and Twitter on HN.
Here's how I would group HN based on income, what keywords make them click and demography.
1. Old system admins, FOSS lovers, and retired due to age folks.
Around median income.
Keywords - vim, Emacs, firefox, awk, unions, inequality, privacy, new tech bad, linux, open source projects, go, haiku, history, and against-big-tech.
2. Fresh college graduate/ enrolled in CS or equivalents, teenagers, hermits, and recently laid off.
Below median income or none.
Keywords - education, degrees, FAANGs, interviews, privacy, income inequality, against-the-popular-social-media, against-google-apple, firefox, chrome, free-speech, thought-crime, and twittter.
3. SV crowd, founders, and employees of a big company.
Above median income.
Keywords - rent, homelessness, parenting, investment, CA, economics, happiness, open source but the profitable or commerical kind (kubernetes tool, cockroachdb, materialize), startups, climate change, big-company-profit-loss, apple, security and immigration.
4. Researchers and retired by choice.
Above Median or low/no income.
Passive consumers so they click on wide variety of keywords. Occasionally, participate in something related to their field.
5. Long time active HN members.
Above median or median income.
They click on most posts on the front page but comment in their own silos or interests. They help direct the site by filtering from new or stopping hoard of initial comments.
6. Marketers, sales and non-tech crowd.
Median or lower median income.
Keywords - medium article, heres-why, how-I, growth, crypto, ads, effective-ways-to, and the likes.
This is only my observation so it will be biased and wrong but I definitely don't think hners are 1%.
But that's very different to the people who are typically refereed to as "the elites". That typically includes - for example - journalists - who aren't well paid at all.
As a very broad generalisation it seems to mean "people who are richer or have a bigger voice than me who I disagree with.
I want a country where the median person is educated and grounded enough to make good choices about their community.
This was already the case before social media, mainstream media has always been controlled by the powerful. By "the powerful", I don't mean a secret cabal of white men deciding what happens, but that only people with enough resources, right connections can have an influence over what gets published. This is a pretty small group and not representative of the general public.
Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control. I think they're going to succeed, and we'll go back to a higher barrier of entry in terms of influencing public opinions, which can be both a good and bad thing.