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Comment by stdclass | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is, they have a threshold of 100.000 users that must be registered at the site.

So a site like unzensuriert.at (like breitbart in the US) which is a right leaning / government favourable website will not fall under such a law and won't get penalties.

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> The funny thing is, they have a threshold of 100.000 users that must be registered at the site.

It's 100.000 users OR revenue of €500.000 OR being media with press subsidies of €50.000+ OR being a service partner providing an online service for such companies.

That the law was made in such a way for "unzensuriert.at" ist just nonsense propaganda, there are plenty of left-leaning or straight opposition blogs and forums that are exempt as well (e.g. kontrast.at, run by the SPÖ). It's a law targeted at online forums by newspapers and FB/Google/Twitter. Also, unzensuriert.at is not "right leaning" it's pretty far right and not very friendly to the conservative ÖVP, i.e. the larger part of the government.

Exempt are also (apparently) forums on e-commerce websites and reviews/comments, support forums.

The fun part is that unzensuriert.at is notorious for the dehumanizing and racist comments posted under their articles but still won't be affected by this law. However, they have turned off their forums a few days ago.

If the government will decide whom to prosecute then of course, pro-government websites won't have any problems no matter how many users they have. Laws like this are usually made to be applied selectively.

So, will a site maintainer simply remove the older accounts that have not accessed the site in a while, to keep number of accounts below 100 000?

Depends if the law says currently registered users or historically registered users.

I run a lot of websites, and this is exactly what I would do.

I'd probably keep the content but orphan it and kill the underlying user and profile.

It’s completely unclear and ridiculous. There are some people on wikipedia atm that try to figure out how wikipedia could possibly comply and what it means: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Liberaler_Humanist/...

I wonder what will happen if somebody motivates a lot of people to register on a site, to push them over the threshold.

It may also be possible to split your forums to different sites / domains if you reach the thresold.

Anyhow I can't see how this will play out in real life and I hope our president will step in and prevent it from happening at all.

So distributed social media communities like Mastodon will not have the problem?

I guess not, since there is no single entity/company which holds 100.000 users.

But I am 100% sure, our current government would never ever grasp the concept of a federated social network and probably just try to ban it.

I imagine sensible website operators would limit signups to below the threshold, so they don't run the risk of legislation unexpectedly applying. Otherwise it also becomes an avenue for malicious actors.

If it works out, and there's no public outcry, they'll just reduce the limit to 10k after a while.

Interestingly, the current draft of the bill says that the site owner has to delete accounts which were inactive for a year.

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