Thing I can't get over are all the bloody handmaidens right now. Earlier someone put up a post about a controlling abusive new husband who was lovely a full 20% of the time and there were half a dozen "oh was he tired" type responses before anyone said it doesn't have to be this way.
This is the part that worries me the most. Right, yes, user demographics change. Yes, lack of decent SPaG might annoy me, but I don’t want to be an arse about it if someone has less education or time and is coming here for support and advice. Even if “could of” grates in my nerves like metal on metal. But none of the little things, like cliques, differences about grammar and txtspeak, things not being “funny” enough, feel as important to me as the sudden influx of people who are answering threads where an OP is clearly abused with absolutely fucking dangerous information.
Usually, I see several users immediately pull them up on it, but it only takes one user to echo the internal monologue of a beaten down woman who’s having trouble breaking away. I just saw a thread where a husband was making twice as much as OP, yet childcare was to be paid for by her as she “chose” to work, bills were to be split 50/50, she had no money, and he wouldn’t even “give” her the money to fix a suddenly broken boiler. He even questioned her about water usage. And still some user swooped in and said, “Have you had a sit down talk with him, hun? Possibly he’s just saving for a house for you.” What the absolute fuck.
And there seems to now almost always be one or more users like these in abuse advice threads, and they usually do seem to be “huns.”
I’m with @DameFanny. That’s the only change I’ve really become concerned about. On the “What has Mumsnet done for you” threads, you almost always see a few users saying it helped them leave an abusive ex. If this site lost the ability to do that, then I would really say it wasn’t what it used to be.