Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one
consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing
almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty
years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to
describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one
passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the
server may also be called {slashdot effect}). It has been pointed out
that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956
The Stars My Destination.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {slashdot effect}]