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Abandoning bottom-posting

jefftk.com

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Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#11

Post by 0x0 »

viraptor wrote: post #6
lutusp wrote: post #2

The article misses the point that abandoning bottom -posting only works if you don't quote content from the message you're replying to. If you do, then by all means bottom-post. The worst case is a long exchange with multiple participants, all quoted, some top-posters and some bottom-posters. And finally, if you quote multiple passages and reply to them individually within a single post (as I often do), you simply mu…

> As far as I'm concerned, a top-poster is either a narcissist or very inexperienced in Internet communications. Or both. I bet you've not been exposed to many corporate email chains. Top-posting makes a lot of sense there. I often get copied on an email chains from which only the last part affects me. For example it will be a long discussion about some task and then I'll get copied because I'm the person who does X…

> (...) corporate email chains. Top-posting makes a lot of sense there. I often get copied on an email chains from which only the last part affects me (...)

This is actually a great argument for top-posting! Totally agree on this one.

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#12

Post by Aardwolf »

I usually top-post because why would someone I reply to want to see their own text first? Gmail hides the quoted part anyway.

The exception is either when it's already a big group thread in which everyone bottom posted, or if I'm replying in-line to several parts of the email.

I don't get why some people are so annoyed by bottom and/or top posting though. For me it all seems to go quite naturally...

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#13

Post by InclinedPlane »

The secret answer is: this is bike-shedding, worry about more important things. Most of the time only the original content in a message will be read, so top-posting is probably preferred. Occasionally it will be more suitable to form a point-by-point reply to another post, in which case it's better to reply inline.

Ah, but I hear you asking "but what about when new people get added to a thread or a thread is complex to follow? doesn't top-posting make it more difficult to get up to speed?" And the correct answer is: no posting style will save you from this problem. This is a fundamental communication problem, and the best solution is to take the effort to add a "state of the discussion checkpoint", list out all of the working assumptions and conclusions so far in the thread and state them explicitly. This is about eighteen or maybe nineteen, give or take, trillion times more important than posting style. A long multi-party conversation is a complex beast with a lot of subtleties, by checkpointing and summarizing the state of the conversation you can ensure that people are not misunderstanding or operating under incorrect or different assumptions and you save a lot of time and effort for getting other folks up to speed as they become involved. Additionally, a lot of times there will be conversations that occur in meetings or over the phone or IM which might involve additional information or decisions which everyone in the thread at the moment understands implicitly but isn't actually spelled out, making it that much more difficult for other folks to understand.

Make it a habit to always be thinking "does everyone have the same information and assumptions in this conversation?" as well as "what roadblocks do people have in reading this thread to get to that state?" And when you notice that a thread gets to a state where it might be hard to follow take the time to re-state assumptions, conclusions, and decisions as well as the facts as you are aware of them to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#14

Post by tmhedberg »

Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and Internet communication in general. While I'd certainly prefer it if everyone I corresponded with followed proper quoting etiquette, I have to say that it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confidence what level of expertise to expect from the stranger on the other end (at least in the context of public technical discussions).

Meanwhile, I'll keep trimming quotes and bottom-posting, whether or not anyone else is doing it. It just makes sense, damn it. I know it's a losing battle, and I don't care.

See also: users/MUAs that send HTML only instead of multipart/alternative or just plain text. I read mail with Mutt, and when I open a message and see nothing but angle-bracketed noise, it's almost guaranteed to be an unwanted marketing message or solicitation from some online service I've signed up for in the past. The visual garbage makes it easy to just tab to the next message in a split second without a thought. On the rare occasion that it's something that I actually care to read, I can pipe it through Pandoc to render it legible with a couple of keystrokes.

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#16

Post by betterunix »

Aardwolf wrote: post #12

I usually top-post because why would someone I reply to want to see their own text first? Gmail hides the quoted part anyway. The exception is either when it's already a big group thread in which everyone bottom posted, or if I'm replying in-line to several parts of the email. I don't get why some people are so annoyed by bottom and/or top posting though. For me it all seems to go quite naturally...

Top-posting for a one-on-one thread is perfectly fine, unless you need to illustrate the specific text you are replying to (which I frequently do). When there are more than two people, though, there are other issues to consider, like the fact that some messages might not have been received by everyone (e.g. due to spam filters).

The problem with top-posting is that the quoted text basically becomes useless. Why even bother with it?

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#18

Post by jacquesm »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #13

The secret answer is: this is bike-shedding, worry about more important things. Most of the time only the original content in a message will be read, so top-posting is probably preferred. Occasionally it will be more suitable to form a point-by-point reply to another post, in which case it's better to reply inline. Ah, but I hear you asking "but what about when new people get added to a thread or a thread is complex…

> and the best solution is to take the effort to add a "state of the discussion checkpoint", list out all of the working assumptions and conclusions so far in the thread and state them explicitly.

That's indeed the very best way to deal with it. But the problem (as this comment nicely illustrates, being bottom posted under a small bit from your excellent comment) is that such effort is typically deemed to be too much work. Communicating well takes an extraordinary amount of time and the speed with which most internet communications take place precludes quite a bit of the work that should go into it.

This leads to quite a few misunderstandings and has ignited many a flame-war.

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#19

Post by przemoc »

I hate top-posting. To a degree that if I'm included in the middle of some on-going mail thread, I often rewrite top-posting quotes into bottom-posting quotes before replying.

Call me a mad guy, but it usually allows me to write much better response (in terms of quality and readability). (Incidentally, it would often allow writing better responses by previous interlocutors, if they only started doing so...)

Exceptions can be two mostly:

- Sending from the phone, where proper quoting is quite inconvenient and it's too easy to mess everything.

- Writing tl;dr summaries at the top of the mail, that are simply required for some people (but I use proper bottom-posting later).

The most important part of bottom-posting is ability to clearly respond to particular parts of the mail in a quote-response, quote-response manner. Top-posting usually works like obfuscation, making leaving some things unanswered much harder to notice. It's definitely useful in corporate environments, that goes without saying...

---

My second biggest problem regarding mails is that people rarely _really_ read them, which makes these textual conversations hard and longer than necessary. Sometimes I feel that I am the only one that reads whole mails before replying to them.

Re: Abandoning bottom-posting

#20

Post by egypturnash »

I gave up on bottom-posting - and on interspersing my comments with the quotes - years ago. I was talking to too many people who hadn't learnt the conventions of the Usenet era and just looked weird.

I usually find myself putting a tiny bit more work into the message to have it make sense even if you don't bother skimming the quotes.

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