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.