Moderation, keeping threads useful and meanness

[ReleaseTheDucksOfWar]

Hello!

A while back Mumsnet started to tighten up on the mean comments- the vicious ones, unnecessarily unpleasant, needling, putting the boot in. At the time reports seemed to get somewhere, posts were deleted and at times staff openly said that serious offenders would be told to tone it down.

This seems to have stopped at the moment. Threads have become nastier again, with that tone of tearing people down. You'd be mad to post if you were feeling vulnerable.

Most of the kind, insightful, time-giving, sometimes robust-talking posters remain. But to get to their posts you have to wade through a verbal river of boots and fists at times. Often they are notable for criticism after the fact. One example: On a very sad thread recently, after the OP was intimate with her husband after speaking of divorce, she got ripped to shreds for it despite the terribly sad particular circumstances she's in. Many many threads have this tone of "why did you have children with this man" after speaking of abuse etc. It's just ... nasty. And completely unhelpful. You can't turn back time.

The other problem is the extreme derailment of threads. On this one https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5492744-hidden-camera-found-what-to-do?page=1 the OP's daughter is in a distressing situation and pages of the thread are taken up by 5 year old level bickering, with one poster reposting the sane opinion 15 -20 times. As the OP says Well this has turned into a shit show. Just come back from work and had to scroll through over 140 comments of mostly people arguing over which number to call ...I came on here for advice as sadly I’m sure this has happened to others...Scrolling through these squabbles has made realise this was probably the wrong place to come. I could of popped down to the local primary school to hear these sort of conversations

Could you please tighten up moderation again? Because right now mumsnet is going back to being a pointless, if not hurtful, place to post if you need help and advice.

Well I was surprised that the recent Meghan bashing thread got taken down, normally they are allowed to stand.

Hi @ReleaseTheDucksOfWar

Thanks very much for raising this.

We don’t ever want Mumsnet to feel like a hostile place to post, especially for people who are feeling vulnerable or dealing with something distressing, so we're sorry to hear that you've seen such unpleasant posts on the site lately.

We've been stepping up our efforts to tackle needlessly mean or baiting posts, and we've recently introduced a new deletion tag - 'aggressive and unhelpful' - so MNers can flag posts that may not be outright personal attacks but still create an unpleasant tone or add nothing constructive to a thread.

We hope that makes it clearer that this kind of posting isn’t in the spirit of the site, and encourages people to report it so we can take a look - we really do rely on your reports to let us know when a thread is going off course.

We've had a look at the thread you linked to and we did post on that one once we were made aware that it was being derailed, asking people to please stick to the subject. Unfortunately it had already descended by that stage, but please be assured that we take any necessary action behind the scenes if people have repeatedly breached our Talk Guidelines.

Thanks again for raising this - and please keep hitting the report button.

Thank you, I will do, but it does feel that moderation is sometimes wildly uneven and really nasty posts are allowed to stand, while others are deleted.

We'd most likely remove a nasty post @ReleaseTheDucksOfWar but we're unlikely to see it unless it's reported. We v much appreciate it when you let us know.