Should men have their own “Gramps Net” ?

MissAdventure

Possibly.
There is message from gnhq stating that the site is for old, young, female and male, though, so that is explanation enough as to why a man may choose to use the site.

Exactly.

MarleneOnTheWall

The question I have is this. What do men find attractive and interesting about what they read on Gransnet? I wonder if a man could answer that please.

The name Gransnet is female. The logo is female. Almost all the ex-forum content is geared towards women. I can see one photo which appears to be of man a doing up his jeans next to a heading Menopause Weight Gain! I don’t see any specifically male products advertised. All the style and beauty advice is for women.

So men. What is it that you like about Gransnet specifically?

Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As she recalls the rise and fall
Of every man who’s been here
But the only stranger now is me
I’m fighting things I cannot see
I think it’s called my destiny
That I am changing
Marlene on the wall

All done from heart. The 80’s ♥️

Callistemon21

^There is message from gnhq stating that the site is for old, young^

OMG! Does that mean we're in danger of being invaded by our grandchildren? ?

Only if they get really bored in the school holidays and decide to while away a bit of time by trying to wind us up. It happens regularly, as I'm sure you've already noticed, having been here a while.

Oh for the days of Vans, ShoeZone, Onesies etc!! They were easier to spot in the old days.

I remember posting about onesies I wanted to buy for the DGC for C*******s and my post got deleted!

Yes but you were running that onesie website at the time.

Half price too - a bargain ?

Soldiers passing.

There are plenty of forums where men chat. Screwfix has a very active chat community! Facebook has a Men’s Group with 9000 members. There are several men's health forums.

There are tech forums such as AV (audio visual), general forums such as Digital Spy and special interest groups where arguably a more evenly-balanced number of men and women talk about all kinds of subjects, for example, bridge, chess, digital art, gaming, hiking, music, photography, sport, technology, travel etc. I’d wager that a good deal of the news and politics chat on newspaper sites is from men.

To those who think that the name "Gransnet" defines it as for women, no it doesn't. It is for people of grandparent age - grandmothers and grandfathers - whether or not they are in fact grandparents, or parents, are less than the estimated age of 50, or whether they are women or men. That was made very clear in the description of Gransnet when it was being "marketed" in the very early days.

There have always been men on the forums, both those who declared that they were male and those who just posted without saying which sex they were. Almost all of those known to be men have been great guys and have made some interesting and thoughtful contributions to discussionss. One or two were not so great, and got themselves banned (one for sending a bulk batch of private messages propositioning the women who received them)

MarleneOnTheWall asks > So men. What is it that you like about Gransnet specifically?

I found Gransnet in April 2021 when Tesco decided to end tray liners for social distance delivery of groceries and appeared to be suggesting in their email that each customer would need to open the door while the driver stood two metres away and unload the trays of shopping into the customer's own bags or boxes unassisted while the driver waited.

This worried me because of what I considered a risk of COVID-19 infection, but also because pre-pandemic drivers held the trays for me one-by-one while I gradually unloaded, and, as there was not such a high demand back then, often had a chat too. The new regime seemed to require me to start from a pile of trays on the doorstep unassisted.

With the trayliners I had unloaded after the Tesco delivery driver had gone, taking about 20 to 25 minutes typically.

For various reasons I cannot lift more than about 2.5 kilogrammes at a time these days.

So i searched on the web to try to find an online discussion about it.

Not as such, but a Gransnet thread about Tesco trayliners from when they had been introduced the previous year.

I had not heard of Gransnet.

I registered, started a thread, and got replies.

It was a very worrying time for me, but I found a solution, I wondered if Tesco delivery drivers would be willing/able/allowed to work that way, but it all worked out and that is still in use now.

So I stayed on Gransnet.

What I like about Gransnet is the wide variety of topics that are possible, the fact that posting is plentiful, some sites someone can post and perhaps one person replies or nobody replies for several days. If one starts a thread on Gransnet there are often lots of replies quite quickly.

Some sites, which can be very interesting, have threads but often specific aspects of one topic, say, model railways, or model railways of one particular brand.

I tend not to be interested in some things that men are "supposed" to be interested in. Such as motorbikes, FOOTball, motor racing, FOOTball, drinking alcohol, FOOTball, shooting, and FOOTball.

Model railways? We built Albert Square the other day. I'm chief gardener and planter of flowers!

Yammy

I agree with lots of posters and think it is a very good question asked by Sago. As Fanny points out numbers are dropping even I can see that and have not been a member for many years.
We have to ask would letting men join help with recruitment?
I personally would not be as open with my answers if I thought there were men on the site.
Men often sneer and laugh at subjects women consider important, Mick is not like that but many are. Would we get cranks joining just for the hell of it?
Lots of questions not really an answer sorry.

But we DO let men join, Yammy They are not excluded! We have several who post quite often, and there have been others in the past.

Those who like to chat will join, those who don't will stay away and join a site that only talks about car innards or football.

Oh the little benches.

Galaxy

Oh the little benches.

Yes, you might see the villain Phil stretched out on one next as he staggers from the pub!

"We" don't allow or disallow males to join, because it isn't up to "us".
The ethos of the site is clear, made so by gransnet.

If "we" object to posting on the same website as a man, we are at liberty not to.

I feel I am watching gransnet die too

No problem with men joining at all, makes no difference to me

Gransnet is not defined as a female-only space.

I have a taught a class where only one participant was a woman, all the rest were men. No problem, it was a class, no gender specified.

I went to a class where the lecturer and all the other students were women. No problem, it was a class, no gender specified.

I am fully in support of female-only spaces when it is toilets and changing rooms and that sort of thing, but not where it is being silly about it, like a class to learn wordprocessing or something like that.

VioletSky

I feel I am watching gransnet die too

No problem with men joining at all, makes no difference to me

Gransnet isn’t dying though, I don’t know why people keep saying that. There are as many posts and posters as there ever were before Covid (which saw all online sites have an increased volume), it’s just different posts and different people. I do appreciate some people don’t welcome changes, and that there are some very annoying posts at times, but you can just pick and choose which threads to be on and ignore those that get out of hand?

As a massive generalisation, women enjoy more discursive communication whereas men stick more to operational types, so much so that BT has run advertising campaigns encouraging men to chat.

As they say on Mumsnet, however, NAMALT (not all men are like that) and some join in where many fear to tread. That is fine by me, so long as they don’t expect to get the last word simply for being male, try to explain simple things as though they are difficult for our pretty little heads, or expect the site to run around them. We should all be equal.

Is there ‘a male perspective’? I don’t know, but if there is, it is not inherently superior to whatever a female one might be. To be honest, given the disagreements on here, I don’t think that either sex speaks as one, really.

Because its being moderated less and less

People are just being told not to talk to specific posters

Threads get completely derailed on purpose no matter who gets hurt in the process

There are so so many arguments and some posters get quite personal

Too many good people are leaving or are put off joining

It seems obvious to me

Doodledog wrote As a massive generalisation, women enjoy more discursive communication whereas men stick more to operational types, so much so that BT has run advertising campaigns encouraging men to chat.

I don't understand. Could you elaborate please?

I'm baffled as to why some say GN is dying. It isn't. Let's be positive and stand up for what is a site enjoyed by many of us, - men, women, all are welcome. So don't keep emphasising that you think it is dying, or it could become a self fulfilling prophesy.
Is that what we want? Most of us don't I'm sure. Let's stamp on the negativity. Please.

Gransnet is open for anyone to see. As SD says "Even if men were not allowed to post here, this website is open access for reading on the web." That has been demonstrated again and again when some journalist needing copy has produced a headline about "Outraged Grans . . " or some such thing.

If someone posts on intimate matters it can be read by anybody who can access the internet so any angst about a man reading what you have posted is superfluous - there could be 1.000 men who have bookmarked Gransnet because they are fixated on some female subject, and have discovered (by doing an internet search and setting up their browser to alert them to any mention of it) that Gransnet sometimes has posts about it.

If you don't want your private post available on the net to any Tom, Dick, Harry, Jeanie or Matilda, then don't post it!! There is no such thing as a private internet post.