Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators.

For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.

I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.