The Hacker News effect
swombat: A full-on hn'ing is about 5k visitors. Not enough to trouble any decent server.However, most of that traffic is high quality, and provides insightful comments.If I have to choose between a Slashdotting (100k+ visitors of extremely variable quality) and an HN'ing, I'll generally choose the latter - although being slashdotted is pretty good for your pagerank too.