flash crowd

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.

