Can we talk about how embarrassing some of the "evidence" people post online actually is

I need to have a bit of a moan and I hope people will take this in the spirit it's intended, which is constructive criticism of our own community rather than an attack on anyone specifically. I've been interested in the paranormal for about fifteen years. I've done investigations at some genuinely interesting locations, I've read widely, I try to approach things with an open mind combined with a functioning brain. And lately I am absolutely drowning in people posting pictures of dust particles and calling them orbs, blurry smudges on windows calling them shadow figures, and - my personal favourite - audio clips where someone whispers something into the recorder and then plays it back going can you hear it saying my name??

I'm not saying there's nothing to investigate. I'm saying that if this is the evidence we're putting forward, we deserve to be laughed at. Every grainy photograph of a curtain moving in a draught sets the field back. The skeptics aren't wrong to mock this stuff - they're doing us a favour by holding the bar at a reasonable height.

Has anyone else noticed the quality of supposed evidence getting worse, or is it just that social media means the rubbish floats to the top more visibly now? I suspect it's the latter but I'd like to think I'm wrong.

You're not wrong but I'd push back slightly on the framing. The issue isn't that people are posting bad evidence - it's that they don't have the tools or knowledge to assess what they've captured. Someone genuinely frightened by something they photographed in their gran's house in Wolverhampton isn't trying to deceive anyone. They just don't know what lens flare looks like or how dust behaves in front of an infrared camera. The solution is education, not mockery - even gentle mockery, which I think your post borders on if I'm honest.

Agree completely and I'll go further - the orb thing has genuinely infected serious investigation. I was on a group outing to a location in Derbyshire last autumn (won't name it, owner is private about visits) and two members of the group spent the entire night photographing what was obviously their own breath in the cold air and declaring the place highly active. The rest of us couldn't get a word in. It's not just embarrassing online, it actively disrupts actual investigative work when it happens in the field.

The solution is education, not mockery

Respectfully, I think some gentle mockery is exactly what's needed. The paranormal community has a long and inglorious history of being far too nice about obvious nonsense because nobody wants to upset anyone or be seen as closed-minded. Ghost Adventures has a lot to answer for in this respect - it's basically trained a generation to treat theatrical screaming at shadows as a valid investigative methodology. Sometimes you need someone to say: mate, that is a moth.

As an actual skeptic who lurks here mostly to see if anything interesting ever turns up (it occasionally does), I want to say: yes, this. The signal to noise ratio in paranormal communities online is genuinely terrible and it makes it very hard to find the cases that are actually worth looking at. For what it's worth, forums like this one are better than most because there are people here who push back. Don't lose that.

The worst I've seen recently was a Facebook group where someone posted a photo of their living room and circled a face in the curtains that was very obviously just the fold pattern of the fabric. Had nearly three hundred comments saying things like so cleary a spirit and get out of the house. The poor woman was genuinely terrified. Three hundred people told her she had a ghost. It was a curtain. This is why we can't have nice things.

I take the original point but I think there's also something worth saying about what counts as good evidence and who gets to decide. The scientific establishment has its own orthodoxies and it's not as if mainstream academia has a brilliant track record of taking anomalous reports seriously when they come from credible witnesses. Ball lightning was dismissed as hallucination for decades. Meteorites too, famously. Being rigorous about evidence is good. Assuming that anything which doesn't fit current models must be rubbish is a different thing and we should be careful not to slide from one into the other.

Ball lightning was dismissed as hallucination for decades.

Oh here we go, the ball lightning defence. Look, I love ball lightning as a phenomenon and yes, the history of science includes cases of wrongful dismissal. But you can't use that as a blanket excuse for every blurry photo ever taken in a slightly draughty pub in Yorkshire. Science has been wrong before is true but it doesn't make your orb real, does it.

This whole thread is giving me flashbacks to a heated argument I once had at the pub with a bloke who was absolutely convinced he'd photographed the ghost of a Victorian child in his bathroom mirror. It was the reflection of his own elbow. He wouldn't have it. Some people want there to be something there and at that point evidence becomes irrelevant. I don't know what you do about that except keep having conversations like this one.