Aibu - not your grief

YANBU.

Making a post about someone you barely know is inviting people to view you as a person most affected by a tradegy when really it should be about their poor family and friends. Its attention seeking, main character, grief hoovering behaviour.

You can express condolences to a grieving family without making it about you in such a horrid, crass way.

YABU. A young person with a very small child has died. This is always a shock and upsetting even for folk who didn't know them well.

YANBU, it's ghoulish attention seeking.

People can leave comments of condolence without making it about themselves.

I hate grief thieves with a passion, but I think this is a bit different.

It's not something I really thought about before, but late on last year an online friend of mine died, we spoke just about every day for a couple of years, and I was really sad. We hadn't met, but I would say we were friends and I miss her.

I think it's valid to express that you miss someone who you talk to online, even if you haven't met in person or only met once or twice.

As long as they aren't equating their loss to the families loss its OK imo.

YANBU. It's ghoulish tbh.

Commenting your respects on a post by family is absolutely fine. Making your own post about someone you barely knew is being a grief vulture. It is inviting people to view you as a grieving person who has had a loss, and will invite sympathies and comments and attention. It's just crass beyond belief honestly.

Save it for expressing condolences to the person's actual loved ones, attend the funeral by all means, if it's upset you talk about it privately with someone, and leave it at that.

I think comments like that are fine.

People crying their eyes out and making it about them, obviously not fine.

Radio silence would be awful for the poor woman’s family. People are trying to be kind by commenting.

I think YABU. People normally post this stuff on social media to feel less alone. Those saying nice things are trying to help the poster feel less alone.
Also, even if you only met someone once 3 years ago, you can still feel and express grief/sadness.

Two ways to view this. Death is very emotive even at a distance. It’s perfectly reasonable to be shocked by it happening near you, particularly if the person was young and it was shocking. People like to add their respects and say something nice about the deceased. You don’t have to have met them more than once, or even at all, to be genuinely upset by their passing.

The flip side is there are, absolutely, always grief grubbers. People who centre themselves, or make their show of grief unnecessarily large because they feed from the sympathy.

I think as long as you respect the first point it is not unreasonable to be upset at the second when they do genuinely present that way.