An incredible piece of social media discovery was unravelled yesterday that tracked down the most popular Tumblr’s post of all time, which has racked up an incredible almost eight million social shares.

That is just one post that has been liked or reblogged eight million times. You are I’m sure thinking it must be something incredibly fascinating to have such pull. You would be wrong.

The comment is a childish headline that went viral that simply says: “Mitt Romney sucks pass it on”. For a network dominated by young bloggers in an election year that has added significance.

The beauty of the post is that it is barely a post at all. It just a headline with no body text. It is content boiled down to its shortest of forms and at 28 characters long, “Mitt Romney sucks pass it on”, is shorter than your average tweet.

The post has been re-titled and edited along the way until it turned up in a Forbes story where it was reblogged as “The Most Popular Tumblr Post Of All Time”.

Along the way the post changed to “reblog if you are a wizard or a witch” before then it asked for a reblog “if you love Tumblr”, or “Barack Obama sucks pass it on” and “Be a part of a 7 million note post”. Make that eight million.

According to Jason Oberholtzer, a contributor at Forbes, the wonder of the post is many things:

“Above all it is a post designed for a single purpose — to be the most popular of all time. You see, when you reblog something, you have the option to change its content, much like when you retweet something, you can then change what you’ve retreated (marked with a HT or other methods). This post is just a title, no body, and the title keeps changing as the post gets passed around, picking up likes under different banners. 

“That’s why it got to me under the title ‘Mitt Romney sucks pass it on’ and why I pushed it down the line as ‘Randy Newman for President’. Each post picked up likes and was reblogged after me and exponentially, the post continues its growth,” he writes.

You can start clicking for yourself on the post and it will take you back, but with so many reiterations it seems fairly impossible trace it back to its origins, but the beauty of Tumblr’s reblog system is that they are all there.

Its entire journey has been recorded. So pass it on.