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A few days ago, someone posted an ordinary question, and I gave a mediocre answer.

During those days, the question received much attention and my answer received an abnormally high quantity of upvotes (nearly 300 upvotes, while my answers which have actually some value rarely receive more than 100).

How can I find what could explain such popularity?

I suppose that one of the reasons may be that the question was linked somewhere on a popular site; this already happened once, if I remember well, with my most upvoted question which appeared on one of a popular discussion boards which led, in turn, a lot of traffic to SoftwareEngineering.SE. However, I can't figure out how to find in Google which pages contain links to the specific question.

Or is it just a usual phenomenon with some questions? A question randomly attracts a few upvotes during the time where there are no great questions, which leads to more eyeballs seeing it, reading it and upvoting it, which leads to even more people seeing it, and so on.

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"Hot Questions List is optimized for bikeshedding questions..." This was an easy question that got 10 answers in about 10 hours according to timeline.

At our site this means it was doomed to get into hot list and gain multiple upvotes from entertained visitors from Stack Overflow - which in turn made it stick in the list for quite long time gaining even more upvotes and views, in a typical positive feedback loop.

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