No actually nodes are ran by many other normal users and bitcoin service providers along with the miners but miners play important role in hard forks. After hard fork the network which will have majority of mining power will survive while the one which doesn't have much support from miners will ultimately die.
Thanks for that... Could we see repeat of Ethereum? Both ETH and ETC are still alive 10 month after the fork with sufficient hash power to support each branch. Ethereum brand has survived so far... I guess ... Nah, we should be fine.
The cases are different the Ethereum fork happened very early in the life of the coin a fork now for bitcoin could spell disaster, because even if at the end it works out many investors will leave and never come back .
This is certainly worrying me now. I can barely grasp the technical details. I'm one of those users who got into bitcoin just using local exchanges and use that to send money or buy bitcoins and hold them. I don't know now if this would cause my coins to lose value. I'm not surprised that some people have been selling off their coins. True some of those might be "whales" or whatever but there are also probably those who just find this all complicated and want out before they lose money.