What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)

This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.

This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.

That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.

> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.

Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.

I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?

Plus Wikipedia offers arguing about widgets with other widget enthusiasts/detractors as a first-class feature via the Talk page.

It could form an entire Lucas Pope game.

Where the url root is /~username, and if there is an error it is an Apache one not Nginx and certainly not a 404 page that cost $10k to design.

If you know so much about Widgets that you don't need to consult Wikipedia about them yourself, you know more than it'd accept anyway. Wikipedia does not compete with passion sites of people deeply into a topic; if anything, it uses them as citations.

Also, counting audience is a thing that matters when you're running ads, which kind of disqualifies you from the passion site category, or as a trustworthy source of knowledge.

The point is to have a site that is not just going to be deleted because some permanently only jerk thinks Widgets aren't noteworthy enough.