To think MN is basically is drowning in fantasists?

[Staggeredatthisadmission]

Who can you actually believe on MN? We spend hours…days…reading posts, debating, giving advice and genuinely becoming invested in other people’s worries, only to find out later down the line that they were in fact fake. Why? Some recent threads have been so upsetting that you almost feel you are living through it with them…and then they’re gone without a trace.

Is it a reflection on our own lives that we become invested in these posts. Does it say more about us than them? Are we using MN because we ourselves are lacking friendship or to fill a void?

I think when you’ve been here a while you get better at spotting them. If it sounds unbelievably outrageous then it probably is made up. Also, watch the timing of updates. In real life, things happen over days, weeks, months. In made up threads, you get multiple updates per day, and the revelations and developments become increasingly dramatic.

Are we using MN because we ourselves are lacking friendship or to fill a void?

I certainly am. It's my substitute human interaction. As such, it has its positives - you'd be lucky to find a group of real-life friends who know as much, about so many diverse topics, as Mumsnet! On the negatives - every real-life friendship group of mine has included a bullshitter or two. Though it can be a bit startling to find out they're fake, they're generally tolerated for entertainment/curiosity value as long as they don't do any real harm.

I feel peeved when threads like "Humiliated Volumes I - IV" get deleted, because many of us try to post replies that might be useful to other readers dealing with their own situations. It seems a real shame to lose good content; I don't know why MNHQ don't lock the threads instead, though I suppose they have reasons.

Yeah I agree with @HeddaGarbled It’s easy to spot, and disappointing, when the updates and escalations come at a pace of 3 per day rather than every few days. “Soap opera pace” is what I call it in my head when I spot it.

And yet, I still get frustrated when people claim anyone earning more than minimum wage is a fantasist 😅

There are things about myself I could never share on here. Not just because they are outing, but because no one would believe them. And I am sure we are all the same, with different things.

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The outrageous drama riddled stories are usually bs and often have inconsistencies early on. Reading all the OP posts without the infills for the gaps from other posters can be really useful if it sounds a bit sus.

Its really easy to get caught up in a story. One really clever one said almost nothing, just bare hints, and ran through two full threads, I got caught in that one early on, then read all the op posts in isolation and realised they'd actually just created suspense and nothing else. It was a masterclass in creative writing.

Basically if it sounds like it's gone from 0-2000mph in a few days its most likely to be utter bollocks. No one going through all that has the headspace to keep updating that often.

There are so many made up posts lately, and it's unfair on the posters that actually spend their time getting invested and trying to give good advice only for it to be turn out to be nonsense.

Sadly these days I just assume must posts that some unbelievable are just that

They’re generally pretty easy to spot. I think you’d have to be unusually gullible to be reading along breathlessly for days.

I do see a lot of posters saying "this is clearly fake" on some totally believable threads because I have known some people to be in the same or similar situation as the OP and I sometimes pipe up to say that just because you can't imagine this ever happening it doesn't mean it's not true lol.

I suppose nobody can say for sure that all posts are real but some of them aren't even that far fetched and people still say it's fake.

Another poster has already said there are some things they wouldn't post on here because nobody would ever believe it and I wouldn't either

Was the Oversharing DH 4 Part thread fake? It just disappeared.

Yes

I think I’m going to be more wary of which threads I comment on.
Some are beyond deluded and won’t listen to reason and then make multiple threads about the same thing but then some are very convincing.

And yet, I still get frustrated when people claim anyone earning more than minimum wage is a fantasist 😅

See I am always confuses about whether most mumsnetters are loaded or in relative poverty because both of these things are regularly claimed about Mn in general😂

Re fantasy. Yes. A lot and it ramped up in last year massively and is still getting progressively worse in my opinion. I often find myself just rolling my eyes after second OP's update. I personally think there are three types of these. 1-attention seeking, plain and simple, 2-boredom so why not, 3-want to actively cause distress to people knowing some were affected by x in real life (and these are imho on rise).

I agree. But I disagree everyone is able to spot them easily. I’m pretty sure many of the most popular threads that run to 20pages + are fabricated. To me it’s usually the ones where the OP is all to eager to respond and continue the conversation. Equally I don’t think many respondents care either way as they also enjoy the drama. Real or otherwise. I do feel sorry for those that take it at face value and take time to offer genuine advice. I do think there’s a lot of naive people in here - or in life in general.

I do think there’s a lot of naive people in here
Yes, that's why we have money begging threads. I would love to see how much some of them get offered in PMs really. I suspect it's not just a tenner total....

I always wonder how ghost writing works on here and they get paid due to thread activity etc

The thing is that these posters know what gets attention. Post that you’re in the bathroom hiding from your abusive DH and women who have been through abuse automatically empathise without thinking about the fact that it’s unlikely someone is going to hide in the bathroom, create a username and password, to join MN and start posting. They just think about how they would feel in that moment.

Similar with health. Post that you’re in an ambulance on the way to hospital with a sick child and people think “sick child” not “they’re in an ambulance posting on mumsnet? Really?”

The Oliver’s army thread for instance some years back had all of that and posters just lapped it up.

I assume the hospital ones and emergency health situations are fake but I never read them so I could be wrong. I avoid sexual and underwear ones in case of creeps. A lot of the dramatic relationship ones with an obviously abusive partner are brilliant for generating replies so I think a lot of them are fake. Some of the school ones sound fake. ‘My daughter punched the teacher and she shouldn’t get in trouble because it was the teacher’s fault’ type ones get lots of outrage, so I often think they are wind ups. There used to be loads of ‘how much do you earn’ ones which were obviously fishing for info on who to ask for money.

I get very over-invested in some threads. I love how people can really care about people on this site.
When I see a thread get deleted because it was all lies I feel really disappointed because it make you realise that between the nice people on here there are also some very sick, twisted individuals. I don’t understand why people make things up, but I suppose they must be those annoying people in real life who enjoy winding people up.

I agree. I’m often more irritated by the gullible posters fuelling the troll than the trolls themselves.

My DH thinks that the wind-up threads where they get pages and pages of replies are probably made up by mumsnet to get attention for the site, rather than members.
I also find it strange why certain threads always end up in the Daily Mail rather than any other newspaper, it’s like mumsnet might have a deal with the newspaper to feed them stories.

I also find it strange why certain threads always end up in the Daily Mail rather than any other newspaper
When I had that Microsoft Start thingy as my homepage at work, which is basically non-stop clickbait from news sites and tabloids (great for slow, quiet days and lunch breaks at work haha), I noticed rather a lot more end up in the Daily Express which seems like even more of a dishrag, they basically had one a day. I could tell by the title which ones were scraped from MN. I can only think that we don't notice the DE ones as much because there's very little crossover between DE readers and MN members.

I wonder the same.

Easy money if you repeat the old favourites…baby names, school bullies, men (divorce/childcare/affair) and of course the dreaded 🥱 MiL.

Well fair enough to your last point, surely? If you yourself think you’re unlikely to be believed, you’re unlikely to get useful advice on banishing your poltergeist who keeps dolefully playing chopsticks on your piano.

It’s not always a matter of being ‘far-fetched’, though (I mean, people invent hideously sad stories of sick children and losses etc), it’s more a matter of pacing — if there are regular updates involving developments in ‘real time’, for instance, or the post involves an OP having an obvious wish-fulfilment fantasy where she confronts the bully on the 207 bus, and the whole top deck bursts into applause etc.

I’m always surprised at threads or stories that seem to develop credibility just by being referred to by other posters a lot eg the Savernake Forest story. It’s fairly obviously an unusually well-crafted (for here) bit of fiction, but it seems to have developed an aura of credibility that I suspect would have astonished its author, purely because it’s referred to so much.

Most of us post and reply a bit but I am not sure who I worry about more, the people who have so little in their life they make up stories or the people who overinvest in them