The 'Slashdot Effect,' also colloquially known as the 'Hug of Death,' refers to a phenomenon where a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive influx of traffic that crashes the smaller site's servers. The term originated in the late 1990s from the news site Slashdot.org, which frequently caused these outages for featured stories. In meme culture, it is used to represent any situation where overwhelming positive attention leads to an unintentional disaster. The meme templates typically feature a giant force, like a massive wave or a giant monster, about to crush something small and unsuspecting, symbolizing the server's struggle to handle the viral load.