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The term "Slashdot effect" refers to the phenomenon of a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. It was later extended to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site, similar to the more generic term, flash crowd, which is a more appropriate term.<ref>{{cite web|title=slashdot effect|url=http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/slashdot-effect.html|work=The Jargon File, version 4.4.8|author=Eric S. Raymond|access-date=21 May 2012}}</ref>
The term "flash crowd" was coined in 1973 by [[Larry Niven]] in his science fiction short story, ''[[Flash Crowd]]''. It predicted that a consequence of inexpensive [[teleportation]] would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later, the term became commonly used on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when it passes a certain threshold of popular interest. This effect was anticipated years earlier in 1956 in Alfred Bester's novel ''[[The Stars My Destination]]''.<ref>{{cite web|title=flash crowd|url=http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/flash-crowd.html|publisher=The Jargon File (version 4.4.7)|access-date=25 May 2012|author=Eric S. Raymond}}</ref>
The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as [[Fark]], [[Digg]], ''[[Drudge Report]]'', [[Imgur]], [[Reddit]], and [[Twitter]], leading to terms such as being ''farked'' or ''drudged'', being under the ''Reddit effect'', or receiving a ''hug of death'' from the site in question.<ref name="TNW Reddit effect">{{cite web|last=Wilhelm|first=Alex|title=How Reddit turned one congressional candidate's campaign upside down|url=https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/17/how-reddit-turned-one-congressional-candidates-campaign-upside-down/|publisher=The Next Web|access-date=24 October 2012|date=17 January 2012}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=The Reddit effect|url=http://blogs.abc.net.au/newseditors/2012/08/the-reddit-effect.html|publisher=ABC News|access-date=24 October 2012|date=August 31, 2012|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141101224936/http://blogs.abc.net.au/newseditors/2012/08/the-reddit-effect.html|archive-date=1 November 2014}}</ref>
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