I’m on the other side of the world from Microsoft HQ, and I can still hear the shouting.

Because this was basically a one way decision that will now block them from a lot of future contracts with governments, organizations and companies.

As the old saying goes: Don’t feed the trolls.

Replying as if half the comment doesn’t exist and putting the word intelligent in quotes is a classic antagonizing move by trolls to make people try to engage them.

It’s banned in several European countries like Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Iceland and Greece. And it’s pending legislation in several others. As to why it wasn’t EU law already: Some of the legislations are pretty new so it wasn’t considered as something the majority would approve until they started implementing their own laws. On top of that several EU countries have pretty strong homophobic communities.

Countries like Poland. In 2020 the EU was witholding funding for parts of Poland, because they established “LGBT-free zones”. And the last one was only made invalid by the Administrative court last month.

If I pay for a service and get ads, that service is dead to me forever.

Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.

Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.

Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.

For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.

“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.

It’s mostly just morons hacking and slashing with zero understanding. They literally just search for “climate”, “trans”, etc. to cut funding and remove access without checking anything, they just assume they’re correct.

And then when theyr’e called out they just lie and double down. Case in point, they refuse to admit they confused “transgenic” with “transgender” to the point where they made a post on the white house website: https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-on-transgender-animal-experiments/ (For reference, it was alzheimers research)

The real scary part is that there are people who have an inkling of what they’re doing, and you’re not hearing much about the things they’re changing.

I think the biggest one by value is Meta with €1.2b. Although their revenue is in the $150b+ range, so not maxed out.

Lufthansa and Air France might have some massive fines incoming.

A private company is selling cheap tablets to inmates to let them communicate with their family. They have to use “digital stamps” to send messages, 35 cents a piece and come in packs of 5, 10 or 20. Each stamp covers up to 20,000 characters or one single image.

They also sell songs, at $1.99 a piece, and some people have spent thousands over the years. That’s also now just going away.

Then you get to the part about the new company. Who already has a system in Tennessee where inmates have to pay 3-5 cents per minute of tablet usage. Be that watching a movie they’ve bought or just typing a message.

The vast majority of American movie and tv just use 18 regardless, to avoid any legal issues

Which is why a lot of Americans, even ones living in states where it’s 16, think it is 18 in all states.

Oh it gets worse. This change is just the most recent in a series of states updating their laws since 2017. Because a study was released that showed almost 200,000 child marriages in the US between 2000 and 2015. And over the next three years years another ~100,000 happened.

And while it’s important to remember that a 17 year old marrying an 18 year old is technically child marriage, and 16-17 year olds girls who marying men who were over 18 or older but less than 29 is over 90% of those statistics. There were dozens between girls who were 12-14 and men who were 40+, some were 60+. And that it is still legal in several states if certain criteria are met.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States

I’m guessing you’ve never look inside a physical newspaper before.

It’s part of a series of articles called “Kindness of strangers”. Specifically highlighting interesting events where someone was helped and that changed their outlook on life, but isn’t some major event.

Here are some of the other headlines:

• a woman lay on the road beside me, holding my hand until the ambulance came

• I pulled over in hysterics – then a passing driver saved me from the spider

• when my cat died, my dance class pooled their money for a thoughtful gift