No; this attitude is exactly what allows for the community dilution. "Open membership" + "front page should be a representative sampling of 'anything the membership likes'" has its asymptote at "cat pictures."
A community starts with a focus, and its core members join because they want a focused community. But they invite their friends, who aren't necessarily fully interested in the core discussion--so discussion drifts wider. And as discussion drifts, more secondary members (only somewhat interested in the core topic) and event tertiary members (not at all interested in the core topic, only in the secondary topics introduced by drift) join, until the community no longer has any core topic or core userbase whatsoever. The core members see the community as useless (because it no longer gives them anything they couldn't find elsewhere on the internet), and leave to find/start another community that actually has a focus.
The only way to stop this process, is to either disallow "open membership"--e.g. you can't invite your friends if they're not also hackers--or to disallow "front page should be a representative sampling of 'anything the membership likes'"--e.g. by requiring that people vote to a criteria other than "what you personally enjoy." The HN guidelines are an attempt at the latter.