Angry posters

This post encapsulated some mumsnet threads so well it made me laugh, there are some topics that you know from the thread title how it is going to go and yes, avoid or approach with caution wearing a hard hat

Report post and hide thread op x

I’m also new and feel the same way! If someone disagrees they can be rather rude sometimes. Feels like secondary school!

I think Friday nights on Mumsnet can bring out the worst in people - so I generally avoid posting, but sometimes enjoy reading the random pile ons/weird nit picking (while also pitying the poor OP!).

I once posted a pretty innocuous thing on a Friday and had everyone telling me to shape up as a mother and to get my teen son to sit up straight.

A few months later someone posted a near identical thread and had loads of support and advice. I don’t think that poster was in an in crowd and I was in the out crowd. I suspect it was simply a matter of post on a weekday morning and receive sensible replies, post on a Friday and receive the wrath of women hitting the wine after a tough week womening!

But given the disproportionate numbers of Mners who struggle socially, have no friends, are terrified by the school run, find the idea of visitors incredibly stressful, and seldom leave the house unless strictly necessary, it's hardly surprising that people are speaking on here the way they wouldn't in person. It's the internet. And some posters appear to have no RL human contact.

What always strikes me is not so much people being less tactful than tends to be required in a face to face situation or an ongoing relationship (I mean, that's the entire point of the baby names forum, as people know they'll get unfiltered responses, unlike their family and friends trying to be polite when they announce that the new arrival is called Flange), it's people who appear to have never been disagreed with in their lives. And I don't mean someone being rude to them, I just mean someone saying 'What you're saying is wrong for these reasons' and listing them.

There are some polarising topics. Vaccines, Brexit, toilet brushes. Avoid them, and AIBU, and you'll be fine.

I've been here for donkeys years under various names. My advice is don't only look at the active threads. Have a search through the topics. When I started I was only on the pregnancy board, and then it was parenting....I'm all over now and more blunt since menopause! But I'm not nasty and have a trigger happy report' finger if anyone else is outright horrible and out of order.

Aibu is the busiest but also full on.

Some threads go like aibu when they're trending on active threads...hence my username 🤭

Some posters on here can be weirdly snippy. Just ignore them.

A few years ago it was fashionable on here to swear a lot and try to be cool by putting up antagonistic but sort of 'wise / reality check' posts. It's carried on but I think these days it just comes across as polarised and lacking empathy rather than either funny or posts of harsh but succinct words of wisdom.

It would be great if you could block people. Mumsnet take note!

Yeah it's dog eat dog on here

Yes.
You get the full spectrum

Plus it's easy to misread tone and think things are harsher than they were meant.

Plus it's very very different from, for example, FB which is all hun this and hun that and xxx so probably feels rougher in comparison than it actually is.

Just to add, visit the classics thread to see Mumsnet at it's absolute best 🌻

There can be some harsh replies but I think the wonderful, supportive, funny, interesting and informative ones outweigh way them by tonnes. That's why I've stuck around for as long as I have! You don't know who's behind the nasty comments, or what's going on with them, I imagine they must be trolls or miserable! Try to ignore them if you can.

Agree with others, no one is forcing you to read any thread. If mn isn't for you, that's your choice. It's been running for 25 years nicely, loads of us have been here for 20+ years and we like it.

A long, long time ago (well, maybe pre-Covid) Mumsnet was a fun place to be where the population was made up of women, old and young, sharing their experiences with a lot of lighthearted laughs, with some guys who wanted to learn about the female perspective on things (ok, some of them wanted to lecture us, but we ignored them).

Now that society has shifted so much, we have a lot of angry people, a lot of unhappy people, a lot more lecturing men, and a lot of women who were born as men, who all bring a different (and more aggressive) posting style to the table.

The main objective of a lot of posters now seems to be to be adversarial, to attack the OP for any inconsistency or “wrong think” they can spot, and score some undefined “point” for themselves - rather than offering support or practical help (which was what it used to be, back in the day). A lot of this seems to stem from the new fashion of virtue signalling and victimhood, with faux horror or offence to make themselves out to be a better person (which they clearly are not). But I am sure they feel “validated” and all that crap when they are nasty to someone who is posting for help. It is not communication though, they have nothing worthwhile to tell anyone, it’s like a seal clapping in an echo chamber. Don’t pay them any attention. There are still amazing strong women here, who have a lot of wisdom to share (and one day I want to be one of them!)

It's like driving on the road. They're anonymous so they act really mean. Not sure why they're on here though, normally you'd be here for help or to help others.

People also speak in ways they wouldn’t in person. ‘(Snarky comment) HTH!’ and ‘I’m more shocked that you didn’t know (xyz thing)’, and so on. Can you imagine people actually speaking the way they do on here to one another?

Of course it's normal - it's the internet and the internet concentrates the angry and the strange people. A lot of posters on here only do so when they sense a pile-on

There are some really nasty replies sometimes .They can often compleaty derail a thread when you get two or three posters having a go at each other .
It's best just to ignore them and they will eventually get fed up and go away .
But as pp have said if someone is been directly nasty / name calling / rude you can report them to mn.

I had one last year that pm'd me about 6 times in rapid fire , they got booted off the site.

Do you know you can hide whole threads, or even whole topics?

I know lots of people find hiding AIBU makes MN more enjoyable for them.

Also, I have noticed that some people get the wrong end of the stick and give a very agitated response, unnecessarily. Then everyone else piles in with even more agitated responses, not noticing that the first agitated response was a misunderstanding
, so things can blow up for no reason.

I think people have varying interpretations of what ‘aggressive’ is on here. But if you think someone is being directly and personally abusive (eg insulting someone directly rather than just being generally angry/blunt/rude) you can report it to Mumsnet under ‘personal attack’.