Why are so many posts being deleted

[soupyspoon]

In tons of threads, innocuous threads

One of them is mine about de cluttering!

I think Ive seen loads of deletions in recipe threads!!

I wish MN would post a proper explanation instead of “taking a look” or whatever it is. I posted a link to paddy power which I didn’t know wasn’t allowed and now it looks to everyone on the thread that I said something bad.

You thought it would be OK to advertise a gambling company? Why?

Why would you link to a gambling site?

Individual posts get deleted if they are aggressive or rude which can happen on any thread. Don't know why your whole declutterring thread was deleted, maybe MN will explain .

I hate the realisation that a thread has been deleted while you were crafting a helpful response to a poster: "An unexpected error occurred, please try again later."
I sometimes think there ought to be a sad little corner of MN where 'post in good faith and full of good will' rendered obsolete by a thread take-down can be posted as a sort of 'look at how thoughtful MNers can be'-memorial. I've lost count of the number of threads I've tried to post on, which have seemed genuine enough and quite harmless, and where I thought my input might be useful to the OP, only to find that MN are 'taking a look' at a thread. Those threads are never seen again.
I wonder what causes other posters to smell a rat and report new threads when, even to quite seasoned users, there appear not to be any obvious signs of misuse.

I didnt say my whole thread was deleted, I said posts are being deleted and its even happened on my de cluttering thread, I didnt report the post and I dont know what it said.

in that case I should think there was random trolling. People can be unbelievably rude on any subject.

I don't know.

I always assume that they must be trolls or have said something really bad but I saw a post get deleted a few seconds after I read it yesterday and it just said something like What's it like at mealtimes in your house? Is it ok or is there a tense silence?
It was on a thread about a bad relationship.
The message just said deleted for breaking talk guidelines.

I think MN delete things a lot more now than they used to. When I first joined they wouldn't delete a thread just because the OP didn't like the answers they were getting but they seem to delete threads a lot more frequently now.

Apparently Mumsnet now is operating artificial intelligence software called MumsnetGPT. This is in today’s Sunday Times.

MumsnetGPT is presumably picking up AI / bot / LLM posts and deleting them.

@JaneJeffer Your link to a gambling site probably was picked up as advertising through a similar mechanism? It seems unlikely that someone on the darts thread would have reported it.

Hmmm

Sometimes a member gets deleted for trolling , and then all their other posts get deleted as well, even if there wasn't anything wrong with the post .

If they are using AI then it is crap, because the sheer volume of fake posts at the moment is shocking.

Because I suspect some don't go along with the "group think" and no one else is allowed a controversial opinion🤔

Also whats with threads being deleted at the request of the OP, two that Id commented on the other day had that message when I next looked. That didnt used to happen

If it's trie they ate using AI it's another nail in the coffin for the site imo

All social media sites are under intense and sustained attack from AI bots, even little old Mumsnet. It can be hard to really grasp the volume of these postings - eventually they will have to use AI and many other techniques -- I assume they are already using Super Bot Fight Mode on Cloudflare for ex.

Individual humans just won't be able to deal with the endless unsleeping army of bots posting plausible-ish comments, generated by models literally trained on millions of Mumsnet posts (MN has been aggressively scraped against its will, like all public sites. ) Could a person make broadly the right decision a hundred time a day? Sure, at a push. What about a hundred million times a day?

And that's before we get to the actual users copypasting slop by hand into the site! 🙄😂

Totally agree. And even worse than deleting completely innocuous posts there is a habit of deleting posts that stand up to clearly offensive posts that unequivocally breach talk guidelines but letting the original offensive posts stand. This is particularly the case with quite disgusting ableist comments which would never be left to stand if made about another protected characteristic such as race or sex.

Mumsnet advise to report posts instead of responding but when you do the “moderators” frequently refuse to delete the offensive posts and provide no explanation for their reasoning at all. It is Kafkaesque: “The Castle says no”. Then deleting other harmless things on random topics for no discernable reason whatsoever, with no explanation.

I also note that many posters who should certainly have been banned entirely for appalling posts on some threads remain on the site, evidencing that the stated policies are not being applied consistently. Perhaps “The Castle” will respond and actually review its implementation of moderation, but I doubt it.

It certainly has been happening for at least a decade

It really hasn't to the extent that it is now, it used to be the exception that an OP could get their thread deleted, I've seen multiple posts from OPs with quite serious concerns who were unable to get their threads taken down.

Calm down everyone I just linked to a ticker counting the number of 180s. I didn’t invite them to join an acca. Sheesh. No I don’t believe anyone on the darts thread reported me because they are just there to talk about darts and have the craic not to make snarky comments or cause trouble for anyone else.

I think that the Aston data scrape passed right over the heads of lot of MN users.

I think it’s the same regarding the volume of AI generated and/or AI assisted threads and posts. The impact and consequences of these just aren’t registering.

Well when you see the reading comprehension on this thread alone it’s not surprising.

Well Im not sure, it was someone who had been contributing to the ideas. Then poof. Strange.

Why do you think they posted?

In other news, maybe pull your pants down before having a dump.

I am not sure why you replied so rudely to my attempt to join in a discussion about why posts sometimes get deleted for no apparent reason. Very strange.

I assumed it was something innocuous. Much like links to bookmakers showing odds on political outcomes or Eurovision song prospects.

How anyone could be so uptight as to say you were “advertising” gambling is beyond me.

Real advertising of all types on threads is banned, whether it’s for dodgy investments, sofas, food supplements, bookies or anything else.

If a link were an ad by itself, no links to anything - including to newspapers or news sites - would be allowed otherwise.

If anyone’s ever puzzled by a deletion on their own thread, please do drop us a line, we’re always happy to explain what’s happened.

More generally, we are taking a slightly firmer line on posts that tip into being unnecessarily mean or snarky, following feedback from users that threads were feeling harsher than they should. That may account for some of what you’re noticing, even in otherwise innocuous threads.

we are taking a slightly firmer line on posts that tip into being unnecessarily mean or snarky

Thank you. It derails threads and is frustrating and tedious to read.