HN very much has a hive mind. HN used to have great articles all the time. Now it feels like reddit. Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity while HN upvotes the meme of the day (Snowden, NSA, 2048, etc).
But having a user base whose aggregated preferences disagree with yours more often than they used to is no more evidence of a hive mind than having what you perceive to be "great articles all the time" is.
Maybe HN should take articles that get more than one up vote but die down to resurface in new several times to see if it slipped though the cracks or if it really has no value to the community.
There's probably pretty big effects from time of day and other things on whether or not things get upvotes. That's not a "hive mind", that's just the fact that upvotes come from people coming here as they feel like doing so, not from a bunch of 24/7 staff that are paid to apply objective, consistent criteria (which would be a kind of hive mind.)
Can you provide examples? This is the problem we're going to work on next, after we've made some progress on comment incivility.
(I'm going to demote this subthread as off-topic so it doesn't interfere with the real discussion.)