gpiancastelli
Combine this to mainstream education teaching that you should always reuse code when possible instead of "reinventing the wheel", and web shops agreeing to it because "using libraries saves time", and it's easy to understand the "popularity" of left-pad.
To a certain extent, and to the best of my knowledge, those things haven't really changed.
I spent a couple of hours sufring the site and various personal pages linked within some profiles. From my small sample, it seemed to be popular among some sort of lo-fi designer/technoartist crowd. It was different enough from my usual intake of the web to hook me up for a bit.
I was tempted to register an account, but gave up after reading the pitch: "Special Fish is a place for exploring logs and lists." I mean... I've done blogs (on both home-made and stock tools), tumblrs, micro-blogs (Twitter and Identi.ca), small project-based websites, you name it. What is left to explore on the logs/lists space, especially given the simple pages I've witnessed across the site (and the simple tools given to authors, I guessed), that signing up would be compelling? What are the results of this exploration on Special Fish that are worth mentioning?