Ooh I’m curious to hear more. Do you have inside knowledge, or see widespread evidence of bots? I’ve only seen perhaps a few here and there, almost always downvoted to oblivion.
It's not just bots posting, but other bots upvoting those posts. If it can get on the bottom of the front page for even 5 minutes, that's probably x > 1000 clicks.
It matters because that’s the cutoff in the law. If you want to know why that’s the cutoff in the law, that’s a question for the authors, sponsors, and supporters of the law.
Because every law we write is ultimately arbitrary. Lines have to be drawn through massive swaths of gray area, those lines are entirely arbitrary and should be a sign that making laws like this is pointless.
The 90s Era gun ban that Biden was so proud of is a perfect example. They had to include so many caveats and arbitrary descriptions of what makes a gun an "assault rifle" that manufacturers just dodged the rules with tweaked rifle designs. Something as small as a thumb hole in the grip made a gun legal because of how specific the law had to be.
In this case, what stops a social media company from coming up with some business model where a child company is spun up for every 4.9m users? You could argue its more like Mastodon, a decentralized network that just happens to use the same proprietary protocol, app, and is owned by the same parent Corp.
Marginalium: Some laws are arbitrary, not all. They may all be contingent, which is different from arbitrary. Ultimately, law is a prudential determination of moral principle.
The distinction between arbitrary and contingent is very muddy in a legal sense where arbitrary has a specific meaning related to laws and court decisions. The two relevant definitions of arbitrary are:
> based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something
> law : depending on individual discretion (as of a judge) and not fixed by law
A law itself fits the first definition. At best, a law is written by a tiny minority of the population but with the intent of best reflecting the majority opinion or preference.
I'd be really interested to hear an example of a law that is based on necessity or intrinsic nature, though maybe there are a few!
Does HN have more than 5 million user accounts?