Duckduckgo has pretty much become one of the mainstream search engines. Normal, everyday users who find google's surveillance offputting because of its comprehensive nature probably think they are comparatively more private with something like duckduckgo. They will probably not react as strongly as power users or more privacy oriented folk. So, i doubt the points of view on hacker news is very damaging to duckduckgo.

DuckDuckGo has sub-1% market share. There’s no sense in which that can be considered “mainstream”.