You are not quite right and there are "organized groups" active on HN influencing sensitive topics. The equivalence you are making i.e. "society is divided, the HN community is a reflection of the society and therefore the community is divided" does not say anything about how specific groups may exploit the situation and push their agenda. They are not all rational actors nor is it a zero-sum game.
To understand what i mean take a look at;
1) Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book). Specifically his The Minority Rule which basically states that an intransigent minority can almost always prevail over a flexible majority. It is the asymmetry which is being used to game the system.
it would be helpful to evidence your hypothesis with example threads here on HN, I guess. do you have examples at hand? And are you talking about "brigading", i.e. groups of HN users who organize outside HN to in dang's terms "activate" discussions inside HN? as in "hey brigade, please have a look at topic xyz: ..."? is this what you're talking about?
To understand what i mean take a look at;
1) Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book). Specifically his The Minority Rule which basically states that an intransigent minority can almost always prevail over a flexible majority. It is the asymmetry which is being used to game the system.
Nassim Taleb's article The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Nassim Taleb & Naval Ravikant video on The Minority Rule - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlW2aamDFc
2) Also see Game Theory(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) and the books The Evolution of Cooperation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation), The Complexity of Cooperation(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation) by Robert Axelrod
Veritasium's video on Game Theory and Axelrod's tournaments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
Influence decision models: From cooperative game theory to social network analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15740...
A Survey of Game Theory as Applied to Social Networks - https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/TST.2020.9010005