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Comment by dbattaglia | Hacker News Reader

> Also, I fail to see what this is doing on HN, sorry.

It's currently #1 on HN. Think about that. Just because you don't care about Bowies death doesn't mean it's not important to a lot of people on here. There's a ton of articles (especially sociology and science focused) that I wouldn't think belong here but they're interesting and I'm glad people post them.

View on HN

Not just #1. Right now, it has 863 upvotes; that's a ton for a story that broke in the middle of the night on a Sunday. The next highest has 347, and has been around for a day-plus. This pretty clearly hits home for a lot of people, and I really, really hate the faux-above-it-all "I don't see what this is doing on HN" mini-modding. It's here because people believe it should be here.

(edit: 899 points, 18 minutes later. wheeeee)

I am just hearing about him now that he has died. I don't see why it is SO relevant to HN community. I don't see any similarities here whatsoever. Nor do I see a hacker theme.

Would appreciate if someone would enlighten me on this.

The fact that you did not know about his existence does not change his impact on music and culture or undermines his significance. There are a lot of people that you do not know that had huge impact on different aspects of culture.

>>Nor do I see a hacker theme.

I am not sure who defines what is "hacker theme" and what is not. Number of up-votes shows that people on HN want to see this topic here. If person of huge cultural significance dies, that impacts all subcultures, including "hackers".

I like to think of such "strange" highly voted posts as revealing a hidden correlation. Yes, there may not be any obvious prior reason to expect that people who frequent HN find David Bowie or his death significant. And yet they do. There doesn't have to be a cause-and-effect or "logical" explanation. It is what it is.

People who frequent HN are likely to be part of the set of people who have been influenced by popular culture, which is a superset of David Bowie fans.

This would imply that all/most posts about popular culture figures are highly upvoted in HN but I doubt this is the case (no data, just subjective impression).

I think it just implies that HN users are informed by popular culture. Not every cultural figure is likely to be as important to HN users as every other, but some[0] clearly are, and posts about deaths are of a different sort.

[0]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dies&sort=byPopularity&prefix=...

> hacker theme

Bowie Bonds, BowieNet, his foresight regarding the music industry with regards to data sharing, the future copyright battles, his use of electronic instruments, self-production, etc.[0]

[0]: http://qz.com/590957/david-bowie-wasnt-just-an-incredible-ar...

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