There definitely are trends on HN and while they don't fit a 100% of the population, they drive a lot of the opinions and discourse.

While the readership may be large and diverse, there is nevertheless a Hacker News zeitgeist, especially due to the way downvoting causes comments to be greyed out. The acceptable range of discourse does not extend to anything non-flaggable, and comments do not stand or fall based solely on their thoughtfulness or logic. This forum is still a popularity contest, and there are both winners and losers.

Greyed out comments are still legible. I regularly see people saying things like "I'm sure my comment will be flagged", and days later, it just isn't. Sure, there's a popularity contest - unless you get rid of voting and display-in-vote-order, there always will be. But I would say that paying much attention to that rather than the contents of comments represents a personal choice to be distracted by the noise of the "contest", even while the signal remains in plain sight.

Sometimes folks probably feel HN has three people: the person, the people that agree with the person, the people that disagree with the person. Four, if you count moderaters (who I imagine are cooler than Robocop).

Okay, enough navel gazing for me!