Since they're pretty and usually not completely content-less (bad infographics are a great way to spread very few facts over a very large area), they often get a lot of hits on social news sites like Reddit, Digg, and even, sometimes, HN. Because of this, they've become a favorite tool of people trying to do SEO to take advantage of that traffic.
I think overall it's a good thing, really, though. I'm not sure there exists a strong brand for "sensational but detailed information that you probably shouldn't trust but instead just think about" but infographics (both the bad and the good, which are still often very pale demonstrations of interesting data) are filling that hole. What I hope is that they eventually teach people to be more skeptical and questioning of information presented to them, regardless of how statistical it seems.
The unfortunate transitory period is a flock of the confidently misled, I suppose.
It should be clear that the complaint here is about the explosion of "infographics" that are at best a shallow aesthetic improvement, at worst a migration of text into an senselessly organized image.
Well, infographics are often drummed up for SEO reasons. You simply take advantage of the fact that people hotlink 99% of the time, and all it takes is one controversial or popular infographic to get approximately 1MM backlinks.
> Infographs are usually very pretty, but it's really a gimmick, they're not useful content, it's link bait to get traffic to a blog.
Why so cynical? God forbid somebody represent data in an aesthetically pleasing manner. If infographics are a gimmick, then so is anything anybody ever does to make their creations interesting to read/view/use.