Fair enough, I unflagged the story. My annoyance probably stems from all the dogecoin fans calling it a "joke" currency to mask their greed. It was a joke currency two months ago. Now it's a liquid, $MM cryptocurrency second to Bitcoin.
It's still a joke, which is why it does well. It's got a serious strain, but it's firmly rooted in internet sillyness and people throw it around willy-nilly right now specifically because it's a "joke" with some minimal amount of value. People treat it as functionally equivalent to reddit karma or whatever - at the moment, it's broadly used as kind of a secondary upvote. Just because it's a joke doesn't mean it can't also be a serious cryptocurrency. It's just rebranded Litecoin, after all.
As far as "second to bitcoin", not quite. Its market cap jumped quite a bit in the past day, but it's still 8th on the list according to http://coinmarketcap.com/
I think those are different sets of people for the most part. The people who think of it as a currency-of-fun are still there, but investors/speculators/scammers have joined too.
