When complaining about "the effect" on a news aggregation site it's customary to refer to it by the name of said site. So here it is called "The HN effect." Nevermind the absurdity of this name, on account of HN's (thankfully) small community size. It's just polite. If you MUST refer to "the effect" by any other name, give credit to the historical originator: It's called "The Slashdot Effect." Not Digg, and certainly not reddit.

(Actually I'm not sure Slashdot was the first, though I was aware of "slashdotting" as a verb more than 10 years ago. Anyone know of predating claim to "the effect" by another site?")