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).