Do citation counts explode like news in social networks and when did this start? From facebook/youtube it is known that if a video/post gets a distinct amount of likes, at some point the overall like number of this video is going to explode due to a network and avalanche effect. 

I was recently wondering while thinking about bibliographic metrics like h-index, how much  such effects apply in 21st academic publishing and also up to which decade (before internet existed, before strong networks in internet existed) this effect might also retroactive have pushed for instance publications of the 95-00 more than 90-95 years, also the real impact actually was not much higher. Probably this effect can be identified in time by looking when number of worldwide citations exploded, although the number of researchers just grew steadily.

Is the bibliopgraphic science investigating such questions? Any books or review papers I could read. I'm especially wondering which open source data sources there are to tackle such questions, if there are. Best I could google is this:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bibliometrix/vignettes/bibliometrix-vignette.html

I'm asking as I'm wondering which citation count is actually necessary in some fields to see if a paper really had an impact on the community, didn't penetrate it, was mediocre. This will depend on community size and field. But I'm wondering how to estimate it, kind of Fermi-problem.
This seems like a naive view of citations. They aren't "likes" or even recommendations to read a paper. They reference things that actually support and form a background for a new work. 

So, if citations suddenly explode within a field, and people are working honestly and not just gaming the system, then that field must be pretty hot with a lot of actual research going on. 

And gaming the system outside a small working community is pretty hard since a lot of people need to cooperate. 

But some fields are indeed hot for a while, with a lot of research, hence citations. But then they cool. Some future discovery may heat them up again and the cycle repeats. An a fresh discovery can often lead to new ways of looking at a problem and that, alone, will generate new ideas and new papers and new citations. 

But a small citation count doesn't necessarily mean that a paper is unimportant. It may be incredibly important, but only to a small set of researchers. On the other hand, a less seminal paper might have a high count if it appears in a popular field. 

And a there are a lot of people who aren't drawn to popular fields, thinking they will be just a face in the mob. 

But research in general is hard. Facebook requires little actual intellectual effort. A paper in Nature requires quite a lot. 

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” ~~Albert Einstein