Well I hit an all-time record yesterday of contributing to no less than five threads which have all been deleted in the past couple of days!
Yes, I post because I want to, and no one is holding a gun to my head, but the whole-thread deletions are getting a bit excessive imho!
The latest thread to be deleted was the one about feeling lonely on the school run “because it broke talk guidelines”,
I really don’t understand it because, although robust views were exchanged, people were criticising post content not other posters per se. I mean do we want every thread now to be so anodyne that people can’t be bothered to comment?
That particular thread got moderately spicy because a poster was very disparaging of op and others, including myself, defended her.
I can’t be sure but I suspect it was the person who made the nasty comment in the first place who reported ifyswim! In other words, people are reporting when the argument isn’t going their way.
The same thing happened regularly on the Royal Family threads although that has calmed down of late.
Another thread which was deleted was about an adult child moving back home. It was deleted because “it was making the op more depressed”. Now fair enough, the site has to be very careful where mh is concerned, but in this instance, no one had been mean intentionally, the thread had just not gone particularly in the op’s favour and I suspect that they hadn’t received the replies they wanted.
I have been on Mumsnet for aeons and have always found the moderation to be fair, sensible and kind. And I’ve benefited from this myself occasionally in the past when I have accidentally over-shared or posted an identifying detail by mistake. And then I have been very grateful for HQ removing my individual posts and learned my lesson.
But to have entire threads go “poof” so often is a bit much!
It’s like Mumsnet HQ are just blanket deleting any threads which receive a certain number of reports, rather than reading the content of the thread properly and making more considered decisions based on that reading.
Maybe the site has grown so large that they don’t have the manpower to do that any more. I know firm but fair moderation on a site this size is really hard to do. But the content of threads is important and forms the nub of the business.
And when so many thread deletions are taking place, and you log back in to see how a thread you have contributed to is going, and it’s no longer there, you start thinking perhaps that it’s not worth posting in the first place.
Edited to say: thank you Munsnet Towers for reading what is a bit of an essay! I love the site really 😃