MNHQ want money from us

[JellySlice]

Perhaps now is the time to tell MNHQ what we want from them.

eg
Relaxation of the anti-women censorship rules.
Reinstating banned respected posters like LangCleg.

Feminism and Women's Rights. The name of this page before they changed it to Feminist Chat.

Ninja!

Feminism Chat. The place that people complain about, post elsewhere about how difficult it is to hide and avoid which is needed because it’s so awful, yet spend an inordinate amount of time here. It does strange things to people, this place, strange things 👻

I'm only here for the recipes.

I have been attacked on FWR and called a troll (which I am not) because I don't agree with some of what is said on here. I do think things around Trans are exaggerated. But I think you should be able to say what you want without all the extra rules that only apply to this part of the site.

Something interesting JustineMumsnet said in the thread about Premium Membership on "Site Stuff" - the bits of this that I have bolded:

"I just want to pick up on the idea that we simply remove stuff because it's reported by non-members or single issue activists and that this happens a lot. In fact we've had zero reports on trans issues by email since the beginning of the year.

And when posts are reported we look at the post in context and apply our guidelines to decide whether or not it warrants deletion. Posts on both sides of the trans/ womens' rights debate are reported overwhelmingly by long-standing mumsnet members who are active on the site. When it's clear that people are reporting vexatiously on posts that do not require deletion we deal with that appropriately, and we have banned people who are only here to promote a single issue or to censor the conversation around a single issue.

Ultimately our aim is to consider only one thing though, whether posts are made within our guidelines and if they're not, they go."

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/3874618-Mumsnet-Premium-membership-please-support-us-if-you-can?msgid=95471726

"we have banned people who are only here to promote a single issue or to censor the conversation around a single issue"

There is nothing bearing anything resemblance to this in either:

Mumsnet's Talk Guidelines
www.mumsnet.com/info/netiquette

or

Mumsnet moderation principles for discussions around gender identity and sex
www.mumsnet.com/info/trans-rights-moderation-policy

(A shame that the URL for that page has not been changed to match the updated page title!)

That statement is made in the context of moderation of FWR and I am guessing that it is those considerations that lead to the banning of "newbie visitors" who come here to "educate" us and who brook no disagreement.

Alongside the comment about "people reporting vexatiously on posts that do not require deletion" it gives me a bit more confidence that Mods are more even-handed than it feels at times.

Then there are these comments:
"we've had zero reports on trans issues by email since the beginning of the year . . . posts on both sides of the trans/ womens' rights debate are reported overwhelmingly by long-standing mumsnet members who are active on the site."

(Note the terminology has defaulted from "the gender identity and sex debate" back to "the trans/ womens' rights debate".)

I have seen "gender critical" posts being deleted in threads where there is general agreement, ie. where no one participating in the discussion is expressing opposing views. Usually the deletions come very soon after replies have been posted. From what Justine has said, this must be the result of complaints from "long-standing mumsnet members who are active on the site".

This feels even more creepy than the "external monitors", ie. that "long-standing mumsnet members who are active on the site" are monitoring FWR and cowardly sniping from the side-lines without putting their own heads over the parapet. What sad lives they must lead, lurking on FWR threads just to report posts. Pathetic.

Yes, the monitors flag it to each other, then those monitors who are registered do the reporting. I don’t know what the “by email” bit means. No one said anything about email. Anyone can just click “report”.

I’m sure the well-intentioned moderators don’t delete a lot of the posts that the Monitors complain about, and for that I’m grateful, but that doesn’t change the fact there is a self-admitted publicly announced group of people - registered Mumsnetters included - who make it their life goal to find any tiny controversial thing in any post on this forum and report it. I have experienced this first hand. One word was deemed inflammatory. It wasn’t, it was normal English language use, but I changed that one word and was allowed to repost after protesting. It’s stuff like this that gets my goat. My post didn’t break any rules, but the Monitors take advantage of overwhelmed moderators who no doubt err on the side of caution. You can’t start a thread about Jazz Jennings, an adult with a TV show depicting every personal detail of her life. Threads about Caster Semenya are now removed for “not being in the spirit” even though it’s been proven and publicly stated that Semenya is biologically male and still wants to circumvent the rules to race against women. That’s not fair in my opinion and not something that entices me to part with money.

I’d love to see some stats on where the extra workload of moderating FWR lies. I imagine there are two broad categories: moderating the pbp and midnight misogynist type threads, and moderating the multiple reports on perfectly reasonable posts that might have the “wrong” pronoun, lack of perceived kindness to certain people, and “inflammatory” single words like one of mine. I bet the vast majority of hard work is from the latter category.

As I said on that Site Stuff thread, if FWR is such hard work, remove the extra special rules that require an extra level of moderation, and ignore reports from people who clearly have a vested interest in trying to shut this forum down. We all know who those are if they post regularly. If they don’t post regularly we know they are only signed up for the sole purpose of being part of the Monitors.

I'm a regular active MN user and have been for years out on the main boards, why would I want to stay away?
I (usually) like it here.

This is a typically disingenuous comment from you. As you well know I’m referring to your participation on FWR, not on MN. Which you can’t keep away from, oddly, despite your avowed “disgust”. Even now you are on Justine’s begging thread complaining about FWR and how awful its posters are. Again, I find myself thinking how odd it is that you are constantly on a board you profess to find disgusting.

It's that 'one word' of notbadconsidering that opened my eyes to the nature of the moderation. So bizarre.

I am unsure about this, given all the issues raised here.

Please pay.

You might not think it is perfect but it is a resource. And it isn’t free to run.

Please pay

You have no right to ask others to pay. Your choice if you want to, but don’t ask others to.

You might not think it is perfect but it is a resource. And it isn’t free to run

The resource is the posters. If MN goes it isn’t difficult to set up a new forum.

I'm interested in women's rights which is why I first came on FWR.
Just because I don't agree on trans issues with the majority, doesn't mean I don't have any right to be here.

You might not think it is perfect but it is a resource. And it isn’t free to run.

We are the product. It needs to be said repeatedly. We are the product. MNHQ bears cost so posters can post and thus create a sellable market to advertisers, and reaps that cost back. The resource for posters is a bonus for posters but it’s not so product MNHQ is selling to us, a result of the product - us - being here for so long. The presence of posters is the source of income for MNHQ.

Why should anyone pay for the privilege of their presence on a website being sold to someone else? It’s like a twisted version on MLM. “We sell you to advertisers! Give us some money because...the advertisers aren’t giving us as much for you as they used to! That’s fair ain’t it?”

At the time of Emma Healey and her malicious data leak I was struck by how non-transparent the handling was by MN and how consequence-free it was for her.

Looking at the responses on the Mumsnet-Premium-membership-please-support-us thread it's becoming clear that this is going to cost MN. How ironic.

I'm interested in women's rights which is why I first came on FWR.Just because I don't agree on trans issues with the majority, doesn't mean I don't have any right to be here.

You have every right to be here Wotcha but what baffles me everyone is why you want to be here. On the Subscription thread you wrote about FWR:

Not exactly true - even if you have the board hidden, you can still get suckered in by the bloody trending topics sidebar, there doesn't seem to be any way of switching that off!

You seem to be determined to avoid it, wishing there were better ways of hiding it, and wishing it didn’t come up in Active. You really seem to hate it so much you’re wanting Justine on Site Stuff to factor in hiding FWR to make it more appealing to subscribe. So why do you keep gravitating here? I would worry about someone who keeps returning to something they find so negative, it can’t be healthy for you.

I did hide it at one point, yes - but as I say it's a bit pointless hiding when hiding boards doesn't seem to stop threads coming up in in active or trending.
So at the moment it's now unhidden lol

But you don’t like it. You’d prefer it to be hidden. You know what it’s like and tell everyone how awful it is. But here you are. That’s not healthy is it?

If it's the "trending" feature that drags you back in against your will, Willis, you could always not look at it? Maybe switch to the app which does not have this feature?

Or are you just raising this point in an attempt to persuade MN to exclude FWR from active and trending, therefore giving women's rights less prominence?

Willis I asked you to clarify something you said in the MNHQ premium thread, did you see it?

Although the point is being proven about how having a subscription service makes some people believe they can dictate content.

The trending feature doesn't tell you which board, just a completely generic title that you don't know is another trans thread until you click on it.
That's what I meant

And then you click on it and are trapped in the thread?

Maybe you can give an example of one of the stealth trans threads you are tricked into reading?