As for helping divide society/ politics, have you paid attention to HN front page the last few days? Wave and wave of OpenAI posts, with huge amount of ignorant, uninformed, speculative, conspiracy driven, repetitive, divisive comments that got endlessly upvoted and promoted. That reflects who the HN audience is and what we are interested in. You may say that HN also helps divide society/politics. Yet you, and I, are still here.
Yeah. They have done a better-than-most job of trying to default to open (for all of their other failings)
I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required me to have a rolodex full of engineers all over the world. A tremendous amount of troubleshooting was just looking up who had committed code, then tracking them down when something blew up.