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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

70+ upvotes in 20 minutes, and it's rapidly slipping off the front page.

Dang: Are the mods nuking this story? If so, is this not a big deal for much of the HN readership?

Akira Toriyama was an icon for me during my adolescent years. I'm guessing most millennials here were similarly exposed to his work, and that it meant a lot to many amongst the readership here. Toonami, Adult Swim, early Internet culture...

The early web was highly topical place (personal webpages, forums), and one of those common topics was Dragonball. It was everywhere, and by percentage at a volume that can't be matched today by anything.

Edit: The ISS story at #1 is an hour old and has half the upvotes this article does. This story briefly topped, then rapidly started sinking (currently #13). What gives?

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If I had to guess, a lot of mundanes don't understand how much anime was a part of early hacker / net culture and are probably flagging it for being offtopic.

"mundanes"? Really?

One of the most infamous Linux User Group in Spain was called "BulmaLUG", because of the obvious geekery. The impact of Dragon Ball working as a gateway to different hobbies it's inmense: manga, scifi, computers...

Well, some of the commentary are low quality and more akin to Reddit, but that’s a trend of HN in general.

When we have RIP threads for people in Computer Scientists, atleast that’s within industry and people are 1-2 degrees of separation with personal anecdotes. Most of the commentary Akira Toriyama are merely as fans.

This said, there’s been other examples of people who aren’t actually related to Computer Science, but was still trended, such as Ted Kaczynski. This could be the academia / academic bias of HN. On the hand, HN is a forum for entrepreneurship and business. The Dragon Ball franchise is one of the greatest economic exports of Japan.

> On the hand, HN is a forum for entrepreneurship and business.

If HN had been around in the late 80s I think there would have been a lot of people defending the real estate developers who inspired a particular DBZ villain.

It could be the flamewar detector - stories that gather too many comments too quickly are sometimes buried for that reason, I believe.

Related: how about an HN black bar?

it's not a conspiracy. It's the later in the evening in the US. Not on a major news url. Which also got changed from a foreign language one. Give it some time. Also your weight on the impact as far as the web is maybe too much. Define "early". It's nothing more than some ascii art and maybe some gifs to me. And I'm talking the actual early web, 90s. I do respect the cultural significance tho. That's easy to see. The title could be "...creator of Dragon Ball" to get more recognition/attention.

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