I don't care if many of the most interesting threads are utter fabrications or made up by "trolls". They're good fun to read and I don't see them doing any harm, they're just fiction. the problem is that people become emotionally invested in these threads, often because they are about things which are close to home for them.
So e.g. a poster posts that she is pregnant and she has gone into premature labour, she immediately has women who have been there supporting her and reading her every word. Some years back there was a woman who was pregnant with twins (it’s always twins) who initially found out she was pregnant, then didn’t want to keep the babies, then her husband left her, then she was having twins and befriended another mn’er who had been through something very similar. Then she texted said other mn’er saying she was on her way into hospital and could she update the boards... So she did, then this woman had lost the babies, and whereas she was previously quite eloquent she came back posting incoherent rubbish but had hundreds and hundreds of responses wanting to support her. Someone even suggested starting a fund.
Eventually someone posted a separate thread saying that people should be careful about how invested they become, without naming names, and she was eventually banned.
She continued to harass this one poster though for months. And she joined baby loss groups etc, and then one day she messed up by posting a picture of her dead babies on a baby loss forum, someone reverse searched the images and it transpired she’d lifted them from the internet.
Thing is mn used to be a lot smaller back then, and people got to know other posters purely because the boards weren’t so busy. But mn grew partly because it gained a reputation as a site where posters went out of their way to help others and of course people caught on to that.
Also, back in the day, all the major trolls who had become known on the boards were outed publicly. I know mn HQ discourages troll hunting so I am not advocating that, but the big trolls such as CVQ and judge flounce and the troll who was fleeing an abusive relationship in Japan and mn’ers started a fund for her were outed publicly not just through deletion.
And it’s also worth remembering that there have been genuine posters in the past such as Misdee whose DH had a heart transplant and posters followed her journey throughout.
And another poster whose DH had a brain tumour and again, posters were very supportive.
But now that so many others make up fictional tales that support would never exist here now.