What does "information porn" mean?

On several occasions while browsing Meta Stack Overflow, I have encountered the phrase information porn, typically used by Jeff Atwood. What does it mean?

Solution 1:

This is a particular instance of the X porn meme template. I'm not going to provide a link for that, mostly because I don't relish what Google will try to show me if I search for it. In general, however, X porn is material of type X presented in an excessive, highly attractive format designed to elicit a strong reaction from the viewer. For example:

• information porn (your example) would be tons and tons of information, laid out in an attractive manner that far exceeds your actual need or use for that information
• food porn is the sort of stuff you see in cooking magazines, where gorgeous close-ups of delicious, fresh-cooked food are plastered on page after page
• torture porn in an unfortunate trend in recent horror films where physical pain and torment of the characters is shown in excessive, nauseating detail.

And of course there's regular old porn porn.

Solution 2:

Generally, X-porn, for any X, is kind of like... a really blatant hedonistic enjoyment of said X. e.g. watching the food channel or reading cookbooks and gazing at the pictures could be called food porn. Feasting your eyes on the visual delight and technical specs of the latest computer model could be technology porn, etc. (You might not want to google image these items with the safesearch off if you're at work.)

so information porn might be just loving to look at statistics and stuff, not because it's useful, but because you just like looking at it / reading up on non-useful things.