I doubt that is true. SV crowd may be loud but they aren't the majority 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%.
I didn't single it out to SV. But yes, I did omit a huge portion of devs. I couldn't find any patterns. A dev living in [country] will talk in threads about their [country]. Such details are obvious. But SV crowd talk about rent details of other countries or states which is a trend.
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.
These generalizations and plattitudes are off the mark and dangerous. Sure, there are those working as PR for the elite, or they are honest journalists that work for MSM that is in the hands of the elites. Most journalists, especially investigative journalists want to do their job as well as they can, in an environment that is increasingly hostile to good journalism. We need these people to help keep our democracy intact.
