Drip feeding

[Tandora]

What is a “drip feed” exactly, and why is it such a mumsnet faux pas? People seem to get really wound up about it, or go to great lengths to avoid it. What’s the issue? Surely these threads are a conversation, and it’s not even necessarily desirable to put every piece of context about a situation upfront.

The drip feeds that do my head in are the ones that clearly look like OP is now adding lots more info (that is debatable if it's even true) just because the responses are clearly not going their way. Important info that if true, surely would have been in the original post given how much it would change the responses.

To me, this is very questionable and feels like its thrown in to actually change the responses rather than be true.

Imagine an OP that said 'I'm sick of DP and his limited diet. He only eats chicken nuggets and boiled eggs. He refuses to try other foods'. We all pile on saying how silly he is etc. OP comes back on and says 'Yes his autism does make things hard'.

That's a drip feed. Tell us he has autism from the off, we wouldn't have slated him and some of us would have been able to offer constructive advice.

That's just an example btw.

I think the annoying ones are where the OP gives an incomplete overview of the situation, e.g. "it is so difficult to park near my child's school and we have to drive because it is half a mile away". Then they wait until everyone has responded with reasons why they are being ridiculous. "FGS half a mile will take you 10 to 15 minutes to walk at most." And then OP will reveal that they or their child are severely disabled or something and thus wrongfoot all the unsympathetic replies.

It feels so deliberate. OK nobody wants to read a 3000 word essay of an OP, but deliberately leaving out relevant information is just annoying and wastes everyone's time.

It’s usually because it seems so fake. Like the thread isn’t going OPs way so they suddenly add details that would have been highly relevant in their OP if true, yet they don’t add them until the thread isn’t going their way. It seems like they might possibly be making things up/exaggerating by that point.