And it probably pales in popularity compared to "Which Star Wars Character Are You". It is surely eclipsed by "What is your Elf Name?"
What is the take away from this? What is the amazing discovery? What is the reveal?
Some content is more accessible and shareable than others, often in a negative correlation with value. In this case it's a linguistics/idioms test where you can prove that you, indeed, live where you live.
It's also strange how much noise is being made about it doing it in "11 days!". Most content on news sites have an extremely steep popularity drop off, and it isn't really the norm that people go back to revisit the news from two weeks ago: A week after the fact, you aren't reading the original story about the Boston Bomber, but instead are reading the newest one (of the 10,000+ that the NY Times published on the topic). There is nothing in that particular observation.
A good example of this is how image-based submissions began dominating reddit - especially after imgur - because, more than anything else, they can be consumed in a second and voted on.
In my opinion, this development definitely did not change reddit for the better.
It's not that bad, because there are still subreddits with strict rules and mods enforcing them. Compare /r/gaming to /r/games for example. And then there's /r/AskHistorians of course, which is the standard by which all other subreddits are judged.
EDIT: Having said that, I agree that the phenomenon you describe is very real.
Interesting observation that is so obvious as to be easily overlooked. It would be interesting if upvotes and downvotes were normalized somehow such as by filetype or by subreddit activity so that non-image content has the same relative popularity as image content.
A large percent of consumers won't pursue anything that doesn't make a good first impression and images convey a first impression faster than any other type of content.
Though not all images an be "consumed in a second," all will convey a first impression rapidly.
So images dominate not only because of fast consumption, but because they "sell" their first impression more quickly and completely than any other kind of content.
I am a data scientist and right now I am working on exactly this problem: automatically identifying good content; in my case among piles of user generated content. The question is how do you define that? It's not what most people like (or at least say they like), it's not what most people share or reply to.
• Highlighting (usually, a great headline/share title);
• The audience;
• Content form;
• The KPI. Conversions or comments? Visits or shares? Etc.
• The content itself;
• Incentivizing distribution.
If you say that good content is "not what most people share or reply to" then what KPI (Key performance indicator) are you measuring by?
For example, with a good influencer strategy, shares can be more important than outright clicks/visits, because getting your work to spread results in more clicks/visits down the line.
Most people do not vote - a front page link on HN or Reddit will see 10 - 100x more impressions than votes (my own experience has been 100x+ on the low side). The more complex the material, and the slower it is to parse, the response rate drops dramatically further still because it will likely either be backed out of (ain't got time for that), or more likely when the user is done with it they have lost all context. Those magical tabs you find sitting in the background hours later.
So you're left with the highest response rate being towards short, sweet material that ideally panders to a bias, allowing the user to shortcut even more. This is true even on HN where trends come and go, people trying to evangelize some bias based on nothing more than a title or a skim summary.
All of this doesn't even count astroturfing and sock puppets - the lowest common denominator ascension of content already makes enough noise.
What is the take away from this? What is the amazing discovery? What is the reveal?
Some content is more accessible and shareable than others, often in a negative correlation with value. In this case it's a linguistics/idioms test where you can prove that you, indeed, live where you live.
It's also strange how much noise is being made about it doing it in "11 days!". Most content on news sites have an extremely steep popularity drop off, and it isn't really the norm that people go back to revisit the news from two weeks ago: A week after the fact, you aren't reading the original story about the Boston Bomber, but instead are reading the newest one (of the 10,000+ that the NY Times published on the topic). There is nothing in that particular observation.