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Importing Wikidata short description: "Effect that occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic" (Shortdesc helper) |
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{{short description|Effect that occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic}}
{{Redirect|Flash crowd|the short story by Larry Niven|Flash Crowd|the social gathering in the real world|flash mob}}
The '''Slashdot effect''', also known as '''slashdotting''', occurs when a popular [[website]] links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This [[Web traffic#Traffic overload|overloads]] the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. The name stems from the huge influx of [[web traffic]] which would result from the technology news site ''[[Slashdot]]'' linking to websites. The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from ''Slashdot'' were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from [[News aggregator|similar sites]],<ref name="BW Less impact"/> and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms. 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|accessdate=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|accessdate=24 October 2012|date=August 31, 2012|url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20141101224936/http://blogs.abc.net.au/newseditors/2012/08/the-reddit-effect.html|archivedate=1 November 2014}}</ref> [[Google Doodle]]s, which link to search results on the doodle topic, also result in high increases of traffic from the search results page.<ref name="hwangcnn">Williams, David E. "[http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/07/19/google.logo/index.html Google's unknown artist has huge following]." ''[[CNN]].'' July 19, 2006. Retrieved on July 19, 2006.</ref> Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient [[data bandwidth]], [[Server (computing)|servers]] that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic [[Disk quota|quota]]s. Sites that are maintained on [[shared hosting]] services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect.
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