To mourn MN as it was in the Moulden Days

[GregoriaTheGreat]

Admittedly, it was not perfect (full of quiches and Queen Bees). So much so that I gave it a rest for a considerable while. I may even have Flounced at some point (though was not a Mouldie. I would never have been cool enough).

But I now mourn the Olden Days when nobody had to bother with "lighthearted" when a thread was evidently lighthearted. Nobody took everything quite so seriously, even when they would have good reason to.

Posters generally had a decent command of spelling and grammar, too.

Maybe I'm just old and need to take up knitting or something.

A good thing about the site moving on is we don’t get the “who is your favourite poster” threads anymore, which are basically just an arse-kissing exercise in naming anyone who spends all their time on here

THEN someone mentioned “Mumsnet royalty” and it all kicked off. Which was quite interesting.

I am not even OPENING Reastie's thread this year! Famous last words...

I remember those days.
I also took a long break and now (the children) have entered the teenage years I find myself back. That means 15 years ago I joined! Makes me feel somewhat old
Much has changed.

It's still pretty cliquey now though - it's just that there are more posters so there aren't so many distinctive ones. Certain posters can post exactly the same response to a thread as everyone else, but get several 'Good post Xx' or 'I agree with Xx' type posts. Any yes, one or two of these posters have been mentioned on this thread. That sycophancy used to drive me mad.

I think a lot of posters have gone, or avoid because of the trans issue too.

Actually I really don't like the "some of these horrible posters have already been mentioned". Don't hint coyly, if you think someone's a dick, just say it. Its a bit childish otherwise.

@WeBuiltCisCityOnSexistRoles I’m not gonna mention my “horrible poster” cos it’s about 5 years ago now and I’m not gonna pull up something they said, and inevitably, forgot. But they are on my black list ;)

Don't the changes on here just reflect general societal changes though? Everyone seems to be a bit more humourless and a bit more unpleasant these days. There is a lot of hunning and what not all over the shop I find.

I've been here since 2006 and it's not as funny as it used to be at times but even back then there were slow patches...people just don't remember the boring periods (because they were just that) I guess....

I agree with what @TheCanterburyWhales said basically.
There was a lot more intelligent wit around and hilarious threads but also many bullies.
That round up posted earlier illustrates some of the attitudes that Cod and similar held. I got hounded by Korma once too.
The site is enormous now so it's very different. It still has a lot of entertainment, information and support going on.
I dip in and out.

Been here since 2010. I delete and re-reg every so often because MN doesn't have a great track record with security (Intern-gate in particular!).

It has changed. It's got bigger, more diverse, less London-centric. Witty posts are still there but you have to do more sifting to find them. People NC regularly as compared to the days of knowing who was who. AF is a constant though

It's less clique-y but at the same time it's become less accepting, I think. Some of this is positive - huge strides made with disablist and racist posts. Not saying it's perfect now, but much better than before. However the flip side to that is a gaggle of super-sensitive twitchers, who compete with each other to stick the boot in when a poster innocently makes a mistake or doesn't get the tone quite right. The SPaG does annoy me, although it's twatty to point it out on a thread. 'Hun' and 'xxx' on posts make me cringe but I skate past those.

I do miss some of the old posters - SuePurblyBilt and Stratters were very funny and UnquietDad was also lovely. I used to enjoy reading LeQueen's tales of her guest room hospitality and organised life. There are lots more - but people move on. I do miss Dittany in particular; the way that she was hounded off was bloody shameful. SGB is still here but with a name adaptation. Xenia is also still on here under a NC but it's obvious who she is when she posts!

I used to stay because it was funny and direct and there was some bloody good advice floating around. There still is but it's probably the feminist and politics boards that keep me here now, even though I don't post in there that much these days.

I miss Mn of yore. I used to cry with laughter (trip adviser revvies and who was that gypsy one that ended in singing in CAPS?).

The royalty/quiche stuff is interesting. I never got it at the time, but with hindsight I think it was for different reasons in different cases. Groups form in RL based on similar personalities/senses of humour etc and MN was no different, except that it all happened under the public eye which I see obviously gave rise to feelings of exclusion.

Then, also in RL, we all see how some personalities are more dominant, and how a lot of people like that, they look for it. But again it is more obvious when written than in RL.

Giant MN dilutes everything to the extent that it's just random anonymous posters, but I think it loses a lot for that. No creating connections and building friendships, which is what I liked it for.

Swings and roundabouts and all that.

BlueLines oh yes!! I remember the OFRS! It stood for the “Oh fuck ruck sack” which was a bag you should have by the door packed ready with useful stuff in the event of a zombie apocalypse or similar!!

I have been here since 2004 under various guises. There are far fewer laugh-out-loud threads and anythhing vaguely out of the ordinary, you immediately begin to suspect its made up which is a shame. The spag has always been pretty dire though!

Esp my spelling of ‘anything’ apparently

I wonder if all message boards go through this and, also, if each poster has a similar experience.

For example: I used to post on a board because it was about something that interested me.
It had been going for some time and had expanded a lot.
I lurked for ages and thought I knew the mores.

It was quite a scary experience posting for the first time and, when I did, I was absolutely taken apart by a Well Respected Poster of Long Standing.

However, I persisted and eventually became a bit of a recognised poster myself.

We had Meets. We had a virtual Secret Santa (I can't work out whether the Christmas Present was virtual or not?).

Then the whole board changed abruptly with an influx of posters from another board which had been summarily shut down but was very different from the original board. However there were points of similarity.

Don't know how to explain this, but imagine a board devoted to Sherlock Holmes books suddenly taking on board everyone who likes any detective television programmes.

The downsides were that there was a huge influx of trolls; we old posters were now small fish swimming in a big sea; there seemed to be a dip in intelligence levels (sorry. I know how that sounds).

Then that board closed.

I started lurking on Mumsnet.

And my experience has been exactly the same.

There are still Well Respected Posters of Long Standing.
Newbies are treated with suspicion.
There are definitely cliques. Any thread about the duchess of Sussex, for example, attracts the same people both pro and anti cliques and one particular group try to copy the posting style of the group leader.

However, I suspect that the internet has grown so big that the cosy message boards that used to exist won't ever return.

People stay the same though and the same dramas are acted, albeit on a bigger stage.

When I first came on here years ago after the lovey BGH closed, the first post I read was bemoaning how Mumsnet wasn’t as good as it used to be!

I think before the Mouldiest bit was better. That bit really alienated people and I think that was a real turning point for some.

I do think a lot of the reminiscing is linked to changes in our own lives too though. Dd was only a year old when o found MN. She's now 17y and in a years time she will be off to university, leaving home, etc.

Mind you I also made some really good friends on MN due to it being much smaller back then, including a really close friend who we see regularly, where my family is good friends with her family, live close by, holiday with, etc. So it was very different back then and you did get to know people much better.

I wonder if all message boards go through this and, also, if each poster has a similar experience.

I think they maybe do, but I also think that it's just a modern manifestation of something much more universal. A lot of posts on this thread can be summarised as 'person disapproves of how person a generation younger than them communicates', which is a tale as old as time. It's maybe particularly marked with Mumsnet as the big influx of new posters at any given point are always likely to be those either TTC, pregnant or with a baby, who are likely to be in a particular age band, so there's a marked age gap between new posters and anyone who's been here for 15 years.

Just read all of this. Someone said upthread that I should find a new forum if I don't like this one any more. I probably won't, in fact, because I'm an old gimmer with children who are all about to leave home, and I'm not on any other social media. I don't even have a smartphone, so I'll have to take up cross stitch or something.

I think Aragog says part of what I'm trying to articulate (namely that I have a kind of 'end of an era' feel, as my PFB - who was a toddler when I first signed up for a beating on MN - is about to turn 18).

Enjoying some blasts from the past, even if they made me feel like Norma No-Mates at the time.

Thank you meuh for the MP roundup. Like going back in a veritable Tardis.

Re the roundup. Jon ronson blocked me ib twitter because of that ! Soz jon

@HarissaPaste At least one of the posters fondly remembered on this thread was a huge bully on here. Mean girls had nothing on her and her retinue exactly. And like you say, it continues elsewhere.

It mildly amuses me when current SPaG is lamented in the same posts that the likes of COD and scottish mummy are missed; or were their “typos” somehow different?

I think a lot of people are wearing very rose-tinted glasses when it comes to the “good old days”. There were a core of “well known” posters who were downright nasty bullies, and who rallied their acolytes (often off board) to derail threads and make other people look stupid. If you were “in” with them or you flew under their radar you were fine, if not you were basically toast. Then there were the endless cliques with their sneering attitudes to anyone who didn’t fit their very narrow views of what was acceptable. That left a handful of pleasant people with recognisable names who were somewhat fighting a losing battle.

Things move on. People move on. Every time there’s one of these threads, the same people say “it’s not like it was”. And yet here you are still. Why? Is it because you are still a recognised “name”? What will happen when no-one knows you any more? Then will you leave?

You can say you preferred it in the olden days but still be here.

Yes, and I’m not even an old-oldtimer.

I can’t stand the influx of ‘hun/babe’ and xxx as punctuation, nor the certain patterns of attitude that apparently broadly come along with these.

I like reasoned argument, intelligent, robust discussion and some level of critical faculty. Not ‘waaah you disagreed with me, I feel abused and bullied’ or ‘I thought this place was about empowering women’ or ‘never mind hun, he’s just a silly man, what else can you expect’ or any such silliness.

Nowadays I tend to stick to S&B and general chitchat.

A lot of it is in the eye of the beholder - I also think that there's a depressing amount of 'oh men are so silly hehe' low expectations on MN, but lots of people complain that it's 'man hating'. I've seen loads of people complain than MN hates SAHM, whereas I think it's full of SAHM and particularly the 'but what about the previous memories?' brigade. At one point I felt MN was very anti vaginal birth, but that seems, I'm sure less than coincidentally, to have disappeared since I gave birth and stopped being worried about it... What you think MN is like is always going to be influenced by what you want from it, and your own experience.

Fascinating how we can all have such very different experiences and memories of exactly the same events.

Just like RL.

Blasts from the past?....
KnickersOnMaHead
BoysAreLikeDogs
BitOfFun
GentleOtter
TrinityRhino

I've only been on here for about 10 years so not as far back as mouldies but long enough to agree with everything said in then OP.
The first reply was rather fitting, wasn't it?

I too saw the arsehole side of Bupcakes and didn't see the appeal at all.