11 ms·

Why Top Posting Has Won (2018)

55 points by ColinWright 7y ago

CJefferson 7y ago
I quite like this article, but I disagree with the conclusion, although my opinion is actually in the body: "... And when the thread is short, possibly just a single email, it's easy for the receiver to see the context, and to know to what you are replying." So, in short threads, top posting is better for both the writer and reader. I think calling it "procrastination" is infair -- procrastination is about delaying or avoid tasks which will have to be done. Top posting is "agile" -- why put extra work into something now, which 98% of the time will never been needed?
- ColinWright 7y ago
  I think you're missing the important point. When the thread is short, possibly just a single email, it doesn't matter what you do. In-line, top-, and bottom-posting all cost about the same. I disagree when you say: > in short threads, top posting is better for both the writer and reader. In short threads I still want to read top to bottom, I still want to see the context before the reply. In a short thread, in-line posting (provided your client supports it) is (a) the same cost, and (b) is future-proofing your thread. It's in-line posting that's "agile", not top-posting.
  - CJefferson 7y ago
    I tend to read email threads in order, so I already know what the previous message was. I don't want to have to scan past it to find the new content. If I do need to see the previous message, it is there below the new content. I think this is just a disagreement on reading order -- I want to see the reply before the context, you want to see the context before the reply. Unfortunately, without email gaining more structure/context, we can't both be made happy.
    - ColinWright 7y ago
      I usually have so many email discussions going on there's no way I can keep the context in my head. I come to each email without a context, so I need to come up to speed. And each email can have several points running in parallel, so I get a collection of comments, none of which mean anything without their context, so I need to go hunting. Top-posting kills my productivity. With in-line replies, especially with colour coding (as most email clients now do) you can skim down to find the reply first, if that's what you refer. It seems to me that in-line replies would serve you just as well as they serve me. But you're certainly right that without more structure, email in it's current form can't make both of us happy, and for me, it's simply vile.
      - magicalhippo 7y ago
        Could have been neat if the email client would detect if it was top or bottom posting, and have an option to scroll to the new bits automatically...
        e12e 7y ago
        To a certain extent this is worse. Gmail have (or had, I'm not keeping up) this feature that it would display threaded "as-if" everyone bottom-posted, but default to send top-posted. If two people were using Gmail - no problem. If you were using a "proper" mua, it was a constant struggle to get to through the replies. Outlook was/is no better - the infuriating part about Gmail is/was that to the Gmail user everything seemed OK - but at least for the outlook user they knew they were too-posting. Unfortunately, most outlook user are stuck in outlook - so there's no hope to change the situation for them. I actually believe the state of Gmail and outlook is part of the "death" of email - and "need" for forums etc (that and the death of usenet news. Incidentally why the d-lang forums are so interesting - I just whish it was a bit more packaged for setting up just forum+news (dfeed https://forum.dlang.org/help) https://forum.dlang.org/help)).
      - CJefferson 7y ago
        Please take what I'm about to say as a (hopefully) interesting discussion, and not an attack. We've never met in real life, so neither of us knows what's in the other's head! I feel like, based on reading your article, you believe that anyone who likes top-posting is just lazy or confused about what's best -- for example "It seems to me that in-line replies would serve you just as well as they serve me." So, you seem convinced that what I want makes your life miserable (not denying that!), but what you want would make me, and all the other top posters in the world (which, as you say, is most email writers and also email program creators) basically as happy as we are now. This isn't true. I like top-posting on most threads. I don't like in-line. In-line tends to encourage (in my experience) massive posts, where people end up having several related conversations in parallel, and also huge point-by-point rebuttals. I'm NOT saying you have to "join us", and I'd certainly be happy with a new answer which makes us all happy! But don't assume we just need to be "educated" against top-posting.
vidanay 7y ago
I've never really understood why so many geeks/nerds/techies complain about top posting. It's simply a stack instead of a FIFO.
- dijit 7y ago
  Because you read top to bottom. It is non-orthogonal to stop then scan up to the beginning of the reply and then read to the bottom again.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    Top posting makes more sense if the frequency of messages is slow enough that people will have already read the previous messages, because you don't have to scroll past all the content you've seen. Where it fails is in a set of messages where you haven't seen everything else already. Really, mail and messaging clients should have a way to track each message separately, and just give the user a choice about how they're displayed.
    - mshook 7y ago
      It's threading and the info is there: that's what Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To are for... But not only top posting won but software made it worse by not displaying threading properly (I'm looking at you corporate outlook, that said gmail and others are the same).
    - dijit 7y ago
      Most email clients (well, thunderbird/outlook at least) will collapse lines prepended with >
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    So...you reread every reply in every email?
    - mrmanner 7y ago
      No, but I don’t remember the relevant context in that thread that got its last reply a week ago so I’ll have to refer back to at least some of what’s being replied to if it’s not made abundantly clear :)
njkleiner 7y ago
The site is down for me, here[0] is an archived copy. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WhyTopPostingHasWon.html?td07hn2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solip...
- ColinWright 7y ago
  My ISP is currently investigating ... Edit: Now fixed ... by coincidence there was a DDOS on the machine hosting my site. Should now be OK.
babuskov 7y ago
Top posting has won because major e-mail clients (gmail) made it the default. When you hit reply, they add two newlines at the top and place your cursor there. You really have to go out of your way to bottom post.
- bestouff 7y ago
  I distinctly remember Outlook doing top-post by default (and making proper replies tedious) way before GMail existed. That's when top-posting invaded everything.
  - mshook 7y ago
    I kinda agree, corporate email clients made it worse. Lotus Notes wasn't better in my memory and it was THE corporate email platform back then in the 90's before Microsoft Exchange was a thing then Outlook at the end of the that decade.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  And that's pretty reasonable. What else should they do? If you're replying in-line you almost never want to quote the entire original message - if its very long you'll want to delete the bits you aren't replying to and if its short it doesn't matter where it goes.
  - zeveb 7y ago
    > What else should they do? They should do what NNTP & SMTP clients did for years: prefix each line with '> ', prepend a line like 'IshKebab writes:' and place the cursor at the end of the quoted material.
    - IshKebab 7y ago
      But that just means people won't delete any of the quoted message and you'll end up with an entire thread of messages above the actual email, which is going to be very confusing for users.
mshook 7y ago
To make it worst, "outstanding" software such as outlook or gmail (and others, they're just examples) still don't know how to present threads properly (as in who replied to whom), a problem that has been solved for at least 30 years... So not only you have to read all the replies from bottom to top but replies to different emails in the stack are just sorted by date so they also get presented out of order in the stack.
- kqr 7y ago
  I think in many ways this is the actual problem. Since these email clients doesn't display threads correctly, their users have to send emails that include the entire thread of conversation as full-text quotes.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    It's email. There is no guarantee that the receiving end has the thread to display, even if you have sent it earlier.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Decent clients can forward threads, as attachments (typically in mbox format, I believe), which decent receiving clients can read, natively.
      - einpoklum 7y ago
        But decent clients don't and shouldn't forward threads...
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        Why on Earth not? They're simply ASCII files, of various encodings. And mutt does, QED.
  - mark-r 7y ago
rmu09 7y ago
I think the only reason why top posting exists at all is outlook and an "optimization" in exchange where the replied-to message is referenced (not copied). Trying to reply in "proper" e-mail style in outlook wasn't really possible as anybody that tried to email lkml 20 years ago can attest.
grey-area 7y ago
Top posting is also useful. It reverses the order of the stack of messages in the expectation that you've read the rest already and are more interested in the most recent. In many cases that's the correct assumption: * Long email threads * Long forum threads that people visit every few days to catch up. HN has an interesting mix of top posting (new comments start at the top), and voting.
- u801e 7y ago
  That's not really top posting. What I'm doing here, by putting the untrimmed quoted material I'm responding to below my response is essentially top posting (but I'm responding to your last sentence). I can't think of a comment I've read on HN where material from the parent post was quoted in the way I'm doing now. > Top posting is also useful. It reverses the order of the stack of messages in the expectation that you've read the rest already and are more interested in the most recent. In many cases that's the correct assumption: > > * Long email threads > > * Long forum threads that people visit every few days to catch up. > > HN has an interesting mix of top posting (new comments start at the top), and voting.
alkonaut 7y ago
As soon as an email thread has turned into a discussion/back-and-forth and there are more than two participants you have already lost. The forum was then wrong to begin with. When you have at most 2 people communicating or at most 2 replies, then there is no chronology to the email. If an email thread starts having more than 3 replices or more than 2 active participants then abandon it, and move to a proper mode of group communictation (forum, chat, voice, ...). The reason so many people in specific tech circles are mad about top posting I think is because specific tech circles still do text based mailing lists as a form of persistent group communication.
- leephillips 7y ago
  I work with a some organizations where it's common for an email conversation to develop with six to 12 participants. Now and then someone suggests one of these other solutions, and we try it, but always come back to email. If you use a capable email client, such as mutt, it's really not much of a problem.
- u801e 7y ago
  > The reason so many people in specific tech circles are mad about top posting I think is because specific tech circles still do text based mailing lists as a form of persistent group communication. Discussions on mailing lists are typically in depth and not just one line responses to one line questions, so top-posting would make it much more difficult to engage in those discussions. Though, I've never really understood the use of a mailing list over a private moderated newsgroup that people could subscribe to.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    What does a newsgroup offer in 2020 that a discourse instance or similar doesn’t? It feels like text from the same category as the text-only mailing list.
    - u801e 7y ago
      The ability to use your own client. For instance, I can use Thunderbird. Another person can use XNews. A third person could use gnus. Many news clients have sophisticated client side filtering capabilities. I haven't used discord, but based on some brief google searches, these appear to be features that discord lacks that news clients have.
juped 7y ago
Gmail is why, right? It's not because of any feature of top posting or bottom posting, it's because a generation of nerds grew up using Gmail. (It also mangles threading headers, or did the last time I had the misfortune of long threads with Gmail users.)
dnh44 7y ago
What's worse is that almost no one prunes the quoted emails, so you end up with extraordinarily long emails with a bunch of useless quoted text, most of which are signatures and legal disclaimers, repeated endlessly. I've given up on fighting the top posting fight and instead try to lead by example by pruning the quoted text so only relevant text is quoted.
- falcolas 7y ago
  What is irrelevant to one person is relevant to another. So by pruning down to what we think is important, we have removed context someone else added to the thread later may need. Long quoted sections of emails are ugly, but they do a great job of preserve the context for anyone to follow.
  - dnh44 7y ago
    You make a good point about providing context to people added to the thread later, but it would still only provide partial context because people don't always reply to the most recent email in a thread. Also it's quite common for multiple people in a thread to respond to the same email near simultaneously, or for people to reply to a message earlier in the timeline. This then creates branches in the message history. The conversation is then likely to settle again at some point on one of the branches and any recent additions to the CC list are still going to miss context. Also at some time you have to consider that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Is it really useful to have a 5 word email nested 15 quotes and 1000 lines deep when 80% of the quoted lines are just signatures and disclaimers? The signal to noise ratio is just too low for it to be useful. I've just pulled up an email from a customer today and their signature has 33 lines, 133 words, and 1100 characters AFTER the name and company name. It even includes the email address which is the same as the address they used to send the message. I know that when I'm added to such a thread that I'll generally just make a phone call to a colleague to get up to date rather than try to make sense of everything. I personally don't have the patience for it. The irony of the whole thing is that this is what passes for professional communication today. The groups of misfits, slackers, and stoners I hung out with on the BBS's of the 90's had better online communication skills than today's corporate world. Anyway sorry for ranting, it's not directed at you, it's directed at the eternal september that most of us live in now. Your point about preserving context is a good one I hadn't considered but I think some pruning would go a long way towards making that context more accessible and useful.
datenwolf 7y ago
I was socialized in the early days of the Internet, were TOFU posting was nearly on the same level as a cardinal sin. I didn't think much of it when I started doing correspondence with the corporate world: More than once when distilling emails and do inline quoting I've been accused of distorting the correspondence and should follow "proper" ettiquete. People never questioned TOFU, they just took the default mode of a certain email client as gospel, as a law written in stone, the ultimate authority. I've long given up. Text compresses well and all those redundant quotes are made short work of by even by the most naive Huffman tree coder.
GistNoesis 7y ago
Asynchronous multi party messaging is a tangled mess. Top posting is an emergent phenomenon from using the wrong tool (e-mail) for the job. Basically when you reply to all, you acknowledged which information you have received from and read, and you communicate that to the other participants by transmitting your whole history of your current view of the thread, leaving users the ability to manually do some Paxos if they want to be able to agree on a consistent shared view. Email clients have to recourse to some black magic to merge the threads correctly. If you ever have tried to use email to constitute list of players for a football game where each participant add its name to the list you will quickly find that there are some errors and you got either some missing players or some extra. Because when two people answer simultaneously, the merging is not trivial to do and depends on the mail client. There are also some issues with spam filters or max number of people in conversation which sometimes exclude some people from the conversation. So very quickly history of views can't be merged, and of course it fails silently. There are also probably some accidentally quadratic problems there, but storage is cheap.
Chris2048 7y ago
Is there an email spec that actually hashes posts, and allows new emails to just refer to the hash it is responding to, and the thread hash-graph. And perhaps as some metadata, some former posts w/ hashes.
- vidarh 7y ago
  Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers provides this. Hashing a post is a hard problem, because an MTA can change the encoding of the message in all kinds of ways, so you'd first need to specify a canonical form for the message. But it's also unnecessary if you can trust the sending mail server to add a Message-ID field that is unique (which it can do however it wants to, and then ensure global uniqueness by appending its hostname; note that a client needs to take a bit of care because of course a broken server may not enforce uniqueness). A harder to solve problem is that it takes very few broken mail clients participating in a thread before it causes a mess.
  - Chris2048 7y ago
    The thing about a hash though, is any client could create the hash, or verify it. You could even have consensus ala blockchain type thing. I guess if we use message-id, then a signed message from the mailserver with the message id would do. But signed messages still usually contain a hash of the thing they sign, no?
    - vidarh 7y ago
      You could rely on DKIM signatures for that, potentially. But lots of systems don't generate DKIM signatures. All systems generate message id's. Using message-id's for threading has literally worked for decades when the clients supports the relevant headers. It's not the message-id that is the problem, but lack of support for the headers carrying them.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References are the standard way of doing this for anything using a .eml-like format (this includes both email and Usenet). Message-IDs are supposed to be unique according to the specification. In practice, you can get non-uniqueness if a message is reinjected into the mail system (say you send a message to a mailing list: both the original message you wrote, and the slightly-rewritten message sent out will use the same Message-ID). It works well enough that the way every mail client actually groups messages into threads... is to use these headers. So not only is there already an email spec, everybody already supports that spec.
sys_64738 7y ago
This post exhibits a lot of the problems with long emails in that it doesn't get straight to the point. People don't have time to read your prose when they simply want the relevant data. Get to the point immediately. Top posting won because of M$ Exchange.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
I don't know why this matters so much. Most, maybe 95%, of my emails don't need something in-line or require quotes from other emails. And the handful of times they do then chances are it's going to be a long, complicated email anyway, so I'm cool doing it by hand.
- mrmanner 7y ago
  I’ve had a slightly buggy mail setup that can’t quote email sent from Outlook for a few months now. So what I’ve done for shorter replies is simply delete the entire fudged quote and write my response. It works all the time, except for exceptionally complicated cases that wouldn’t be helped by quoting a random messy email thread anyway.
bachmeier 7y ago
Top posting won because that's what makes sense to most of the world. You're having a conversation with someone. You want to open the latest email and see their response. You don't want to dig through all that other information. I understand that there are a few oddball exceptions. For the vast, vast majority of email exchanges, top posting is more efficient.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Of course, decent mail clients should make it so that it doesn't matter either way…
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    And so they did, but the internet grew on the era of non-mature software. Mail clients kept being abandoned before they became decent, while people moved to a new platform.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    That's an interesting, and non-trivial, suggestion. I would love to see mail clients try to figure out, given several raw messages, what the flow of the conversation/thread is like, then offer a canonical representation of that conversation, with perhaps a focus on what a single message contributed to the whole. Or one of several representations, among which the user chooses. That would be quite neat - but like I said, it's not at all easy
    - ColinWright 7y ago
      Yup, that's what my tool does. It wasn't easy, it doesn't always get it right, but it's pretty good, and makes complex email conversations usable, even when people top-post.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- narag 7y ago
  Top posting won because that's what makes sense to most of the world. I don't think so. Actually I don't think top posting has "won". What has won is not caring about how you reply and going with what happens when you do nothing. People that top post never looks much at the quotes. They stop reading when they reach the blue lines. They read a couple quoted lines at best. So it's not a question of where you place the quoted text, but a question of if you use quoted text at all.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Do E-Mails have an identifier that tells what was replied to ? I don’t think there is but if there existed such a marker then you build a very nice tree structure.
- alexjm 7y ago
  Yes, that's the In-Reply-To header. It contains the unique message identifier from the Message-ID field of the email you're replying to. See also https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822 sections 4.6.1 and 4.6.2
  - leephillips 7y ago
    And that's what mature email clients use to present thread trees, to help make sense out of email conversations. Gmail, etc., are not mature email clients.
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      Observe, furthermore, that References: was in part designed so that a MUA/NUA could reconstruct a tree even if some intermediate messages were missing.
saagarjha 7y ago
Top posting is actually quite useful for context when you've been CC'd on a thread in the middle: you can go back through the previous mails that are embedded at the bottom of the email and reconstruct the chain in your head. And one you've done that, you can just recollapse the quoted content and it won't bother you again for the rest of the thread. (You're using a mail client that automatically collapses this kind of thing, right? I do hope that the complaints about "visual noise" aren't just people pining for this feature…)
- u801e 7y ago
  > Top posting is actually quite useful for context when you've been CC'd on a thread in the middle: you can go back through the previous mails that are embedded at the bottom of the email and reconstruct the chain in your head. That's a lot of work for someone to establish context, and they have to start at the bottom to read the original message, scroll up to find the second message, read through that, and repeat the process. What's useful is to provide a summary of what was discussed and then follow up from there. In either case, having some type of forum or newsgroup would be far better in this scenario because anyone subscribed could read any message even if they weren't part of the original discussion.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury of getting someone to relay an accurate and detailed summary of the thread so far when I get added mid-way. Reading quoted, often heavily mangled content isn’t pleasant but it’s a very good way to establish this context, and in lieu of the actual messages I consider it the next best option. And since you can’t predict who or where a message might be forwarded, I think it’s good to do this consistently so that it’s available as a fallback by default.
sarah180 7y ago
Can we also talk about CR vs LF and HTML vs plain emails? They're equally relevant discussions and totally not things that have been settled for ages by everyone but the obsessed.
- u801e 7y ago
  > Can we also talk about CR vs LF Based on my understanding of the SMTP protocol, lines in emails should be terminated with CRLF. > HTML vs plain emails Thunderbird has a nice setting (View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text) that takes HTML emails and renders them as plain text (complete with the / /, * *, and _ _ for italicized, bold, and underlined text respectively). Personally, I wish they would remove support for rendering HTML in emails and just display plain text. URLs would have to be manually copied and pasted into a web browser. That would make phishing emails far less effective.
hota_mazi 7y ago
The simple truth is that inline replying represents a massive cognitive load. Not just for the writer but for all the recipients. Not only does the email become very verbose with a lot of repeated paragraphs and psychedelic colors, it's also often content that you are already familiar with and don't really need to read again. Most email threads take place over a 24-48 hours period, which is enough for most people to have the context fresh in their mind, so top posting is a net gain for everyone. What is a very bad habit, though, is people not trimming long threads, especially when they forward such discussions.
- atq2119 7y ago
  The "psychedelic colours" are a really unfortunate consequence of the fact that Outlook is still incapable of producing sanely quoted text after about 20 years. It's extremely frustrating considering that most email clients did it right back then. Even Gmail manages to get it mostly right most of the time.
war1025 7y ago
What is top posting? Couldn't find a definition in the article and seems that everyone here in the comments already knows what it means.
- sampleinajar 7y ago
  top-posting (in which the reply precedes the quoted original message) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Your reply goes on top of the conversation, instead of embedded within it.
- tirpen 7y ago
  There used to be a big debate about where the reply should be placed when replying to an email. Bottom-posting means the reply is placed below what it's replying to, like in any normal conversation. This is the obviously correct choice. Top-posting means that the reply is placed above what you're replying to, completely unintuitively and against how things works in every other context. This is obviosly wrong and bad, but is the hell we have to live with when mailing these days.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Historically, the facetious reply would be to give this example: A: Because it breaks the flow of information. Q: Why is it frowned upon? A: Putting replies above the original post. Q: What is top posting?
zzo38computer 7y ago
I do not do top posting myself. For email, I am using Heirloom-mailx which only does bottom posting (if I can get external editor to work, then I can make it doing properly). For NNTP (I wrote my own client in 2019), I always use interleaved posting, deleting the part of the message which is not relevant and adding the reply after the quoted part which is being replied to. For web forums I also do the same (but would prefer they switch to NNTP instead, or to support both which may be better). I don't use HTML email, and I don't like HTML email. Plain text is better.
hzhou321 7y ago
The work involved in an effective inline reply is to snip out the irrelevant quote yet still leave enough context for what you were replying to. An inline reply with a large amount of irrelevant quotes so that people have to hunt down your reply is bad. An email client that does not keep a thread and people can't effectively trace back old posts to recall context is bad. A default rich text preference is bad. Email client can easily apply some heuristics or honoring something mark-down-like, but the base need be always in plain text.
- tatersolid 7y ago
  > A default rich text preference is bad. Email client can easily apply some heuristics or honoring something mark-down-like, but the base need be always in plain text. I’m a grey beard, using email since the early 1990s. All these years later, I’ve realized HTML email is better in every way than plain-text email. Basically, you get every “feature” of plain-text plus important semantic additions like hierarchical lists, <strong>, <em>, <h#>, <figure>, <blockquote> etc. that improve clarity of communication drastically. HTML email can and should be about much more than fonts and colors. A forum like LKML is basically useless without these, but they insist on old-Skool plain text which makes readability suffer greatly.
cpcallen 7y ago
The comments here seem to be divided between two groups: 1. Those who were net denizens pre-Outlook, who grew up with sophisticated mail and news clients that properly threaded discussions, along with strong cultural norms to reply inline, trim quoted messages, and keep signatures short. 2. Those whose first experiences with email were post-Outlook, for whom the norm has always been top-posting. It's hardly surprising that each group regards the other with suspicion, but I think it's really telling that all the people who regard email as a bad tool for managing lengthy, in-depth discussions between multiple people seem to fall into the second camp.
- btilly 7y ago
  I am in group 1 and this is exactly right. Top posting limits the complexity of discussion that can be had to what can be kept in working memory of the people involved. Which makes it impossible to have a conversation that tracks multiple parallel ideas at once. I miss the days when that kind of conversation used to be common on Usenet. If you've never experienced it, there is no way to describe what it was like.
  - globular-toast 7y ago
    It is still available on mailing lists. But those are becoming increasingly rare today. I really hope things turn around and people ditch the heavy, proprietary clients and childish stickers and rediscover the power of plain text communication.
  - anitil 7y ago
    I think I'm misunderstanding what you're describing here. To me this sounds like what I go to Reddit or HN for. How does it differ?
    - u801e 7y ago
      HN and Reddit require far more scrolling to go through all the comments, and make it difficult to find recently posted comments (though Reddit has this feature if you have reddit gold or are a moderator of a subreddit). A typical newsreader shows a thread index overview which, even for thousands of posts, doesn't require that much scrolling, and makes it easy to see new posts within the thread.
unsignedint 7y ago
From my observations, top posting sometimes gives misguided sense of security, particularly when they are not seeing the whole picture of how E-mail works. I've seen couple of people in the past with habit of keeping just the most recent message, because they think the "history is all there" and want declutter their inbox. It's a bad practice, but they just couldn't see the possibility someone changing the history. They had hard time when someone decided to prune the old portions, or reply inline without leaving the whole text intact.
edflsafoiewq 7y ago
On web forums, bottom posting has obviously won. I can't remember ever seeing someone top post on reddit. OTOH twitter appears to have top posting baked into its UI.
einpoklum 7y ago
> Some email clients make it nearly impossible to use in-line replies, and people just won't do it. Indeed. This is somewhat annoying in Thunderbird and nearly impossible in Outlook. > People won't do work unless it's rewarding, or compulsory. ... I'm working on that. Has the author been working on that? I wonder. Two years have passed, after all.
- ColinWright 7y ago
  Yes, I have, and I now have a system I use privately within a circle of friends, and with some of my company business. Works a treat, and allows complex discussions that branch, merge, and more. I now also have an experimental tool that imports from email threads, and re-exports back to standard email formats. It will never be widely adopted. It's unlikely to reach a level of maturity that would make it acceptable to the muggles, but for us it is incredibly productive.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    Have you considered integrating this system into, say, Thunderbird, or some other FOSS GUI mail client?
    - ColinWright 7y ago
      I don't have the skills, and I don't have the inclination to acquire the skills. I have more work than I have time to complete, and taking on the task of learning everything I'd need to learn to then integrate this into someone else's project is just not feasible. Currently the tool works brilliantly, but it's not robust, and it's certainly not foolproof. It's not even average-person-proof. It's insufficiently mature, and if I were to try to integrate it with another mail tool, I wouldn't start from here ... it would need a complete re-write. So yes, I have considered it, and with my background, skill-set, and availability, it's not going to happen.
einpoklum 7y ago
Actually, when you think about it, HN comments are basically a big pile of top-post replies, don't you think? (except for those people who quote a few lines prepended with > symbols)
- ColinWright 7y ago
  No, they're bottom-post replies, without the quoting of context (with a few exceptions). So you can read from top to bottom without having to bounce up'n'down trying to find the thread.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    You see the replies first and foremost, and the original article only if you click a link. Top-post in that sense.

55 points by ColinWright 7y ago

I quite like this article, but I disagree with the conclusion, although my opinion is actually in the body: "... And when the thread is short, possibly just a single email, it's easy for the receiver to see the context, and to know to what you are replying." So, in short threads, top posting is better for both the writer and reader. I think calling it "procrastination" is infair -- procrastination is about delaying or avoid tasks which will have to be done. Top posting is "agile" -- why put extra work into something now, which 98% of the time will never been needed?

ColinWright 7y ago
I think you're missing the important point. When the thread is short, possibly just a single email, it doesn't matter what you do. In-line, top-, and bottom-posting all cost about the same. I disagree when you say: > in short threads, top posting is better for both the writer and reader. In short threads I still want to read top to bottom, I still want to see the context before the reply. In a short thread, in-line posting (provided your client supports it) is (a) the same cost, and (b) is future-proofing your thread. It's in-line posting that's "agile", not top-posting.
- CJefferson 7y ago
  I tend to read email threads in order, so I already know what the previous message was. I don't want to have to scan past it to find the new content. If I do need to see the previous message, it is there below the new content. I think this is just a disagreement on reading order -- I want to see the reply before the context, you want to see the context before the reply. Unfortunately, without email gaining more structure/context, we can't both be made happy.
  - ColinWright 7y ago
    I usually have so many email discussions going on there's no way I can keep the context in my head. I come to each email without a context, so I need to come up to speed. And each email can have several points running in parallel, so I get a collection of comments, none of which mean anything without their context, so I need to go hunting. Top-posting kills my productivity. With in-line replies, especially with colour coding (as most email clients now do) you can skim down to find the reply first, if that's what you refer. It seems to me that in-line replies would serve you just as well as they serve me. But you're certainly right that without more structure, email in it's current form can't make both of us happy, and for me, it's simply vile.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      Could have been neat if the email client would detect if it was top or bottom posting, and have an option to scroll to the new bits automatically...
      - e12e 7y ago
        To a certain extent this is worse. Gmail have (or had, I'm not keeping up) this feature that it would display threaded "as-if" everyone bottom-posted, but default to send top-posted. If two people were using Gmail - no problem. If you were using a "proper" mua, it was a constant struggle to get to through the replies. Outlook was/is no better - the infuriating part about Gmail is/was that to the Gmail user everything seemed OK - but at least for the outlook user they knew they were too-posting. Unfortunately, most outlook user are stuck in outlook - so there's no hope to change the situation for them. I actually believe the state of Gmail and outlook is part of the "death" of email - and "need" for forums etc (that and the death of usenet news. Incidentally why the d-lang forums are so interesting - I just whish it was a bit more packaged for setting up just forum+news (dfeed https://forum.dlang.org/help) https://forum.dlang.org/help)).
    - CJefferson 7y ago
      Please take what I'm about to say as a (hopefully) interesting discussion, and not an attack. We've never met in real life, so neither of us knows what's in the other's head! I feel like, based on reading your article, you believe that anyone who likes top-posting is just lazy or confused about what's best -- for example "It seems to me that in-line replies would serve you just as well as they serve me." So, you seem convinced that what I want makes your life miserable (not denying that!), but what you want would make me, and all the other top posters in the world (which, as you say, is most email writers and also email program creators) basically as happy as we are now. This isn't true. I like top-posting on most threads. I don't like in-line. In-line tends to encourage (in my experience) massive posts, where people end up having several related conversations in parallel, and also huge point-by-point rebuttals. I'm NOT saying you have to "join us", and I'd certainly be happy with a new answer which makes us all happy! But don't assume we just need to be "educated" against top-posting.

vidanay 7y ago

I've never really understood why so many geeks/nerds/techies complain about top posting. It's simply a stack instead of a FIFO.

dijit 7y ago
Because you read top to bottom. It is non-orthogonal to stop then scan up to the beginning of the reply and then read to the bottom again.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Top posting makes more sense if the frequency of messages is slow enough that people will have already read the previous messages, because you don't have to scroll past all the content you've seen. Where it fails is in a set of messages where you haven't seen everything else already. Really, mail and messaging clients should have a way to track each message separately, and just give the user a choice about how they're displayed.
  - mshook 7y ago
    It's threading and the info is there: that's what Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To are for... But not only top posting won but software made it worse by not displaying threading properly (I'm looking at you corporate outlook, that said gmail and others are the same).
  - dijit 7y ago
    Most email clients (well, thunderbird/outlook at least) will collapse lines prepended with >
- bachmeier 7y ago
  So...you reread every reply in every email?
  - mrmanner 7y ago
    No, but I don’t remember the relevant context in that thread that got its last reply a week ago so I’ll have to refer back to at least some of what’s being replied to if it’s not made abundantly clear :)

njkleiner 7y ago

The site is down for me, here[0] is an archived copy. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WhyTopPostingHasWon.html?td07hn2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solip...

ColinWright 7y ago
My ISP is currently investigating ... Edit: Now fixed ... by coincidence there was a DDOS on the machine hosting my site. Should now be OK.

babuskov 7y ago

Top posting has won because major e-mail clients (gmail) made it the default. When you hit reply, they add two newlines at the top and place your cursor there. You really have to go out of your way to bottom post.

bestouff 7y ago
I distinctly remember Outlook doing top-post by default (and making proper replies tedious) way before GMail existed. That's when top-posting invaded everything.
- mshook 7y ago
  I kinda agree, corporate email clients made it worse. Lotus Notes wasn't better in my memory and it was THE corporate email platform back then in the 90's before Microsoft Exchange was a thing then Outlook at the end of the that decade.
IshKebab 7y ago
And that's pretty reasonable. What else should they do? If you're replying in-line you almost never want to quote the entire original message - if its very long you'll want to delete the bits you aren't replying to and if its short it doesn't matter where it goes.
- zeveb 7y ago
  > What else should they do? They should do what NNTP & SMTP clients did for years: prefix each line with '> ', prepend a line like 'IshKebab writes:' and place the cursor at the end of the quoted material.
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    But that just means people won't delete any of the quoted message and you'll end up with an entire thread of messages above the actual email, which is going to be very confusing for users.

mshook 7y ago

To make it worst, "outstanding" software such as outlook or gmail (and others, they're just examples) still don't know how to present threads properly (as in who replied to whom), a problem that has been solved for at least 30 years... So not only you have to read all the replies from bottom to top but replies to different emails in the stack are just sorted by date so they also get presented out of order in the stack.

kqr 7y ago
I think in many ways this is the actual problem. Since these email clients doesn't display threads correctly, their users have to send emails that include the entire thread of conversation as full-text quotes.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  It's email. There is no guarantee that the receiving end has the thread to display, even if you have sent it earlier.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Decent clients can forward threads, as attachments (typically in mbox format, I believe), which decent receiving clients can read, natively.
    - einpoklum 7y ago
      But decent clients don't and shouldn't forward threads...
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Why on Earth not? They're simply ASCII files, of various encodings. And mutt does, QED.
- mark-r 7y ago

rmu09 7y ago

I think the only reason why top posting exists at all is outlook and an "optimization" in exchange where the replied-to message is referenced (not copied). Trying to reply in "proper" e-mail style in outlook wasn't really possible as anybody that tried to email lkml 20 years ago can attest.

grey-area 7y ago

Top posting is also useful. It reverses the order of the stack of messages in the expectation that you've read the rest already and are more interested in the most recent. In many cases that's the correct assumption: * Long email threads * Long forum threads that people visit every few days to catch up. HN has an interesting mix of top posting (new comments start at the top), and voting.

u801e 7y ago
That's not really top posting. What I'm doing here, by putting the untrimmed quoted material I'm responding to below my response is essentially top posting (but I'm responding to your last sentence). I can't think of a comment I've read on HN where material from the parent post was quoted in the way I'm doing now. > Top posting is also useful. It reverses the order of the stack of messages in the expectation that you've read the rest already and are more interested in the most recent. In many cases that's the correct assumption: > > * Long email threads > > * Long forum threads that people visit every few days to catch up. > > HN has an interesting mix of top posting (new comments start at the top), and voting.

alkonaut 7y ago

As soon as an email thread has turned into a discussion/back-and-forth and there are more than two participants you have already lost. The forum was then wrong to begin with. When you have at most 2 people communicating or at most 2 replies, then there is no chronology to the email. If an email thread starts having more than 3 replices or more than 2 active participants then abandon it, and move to a proper mode of group communictation (forum, chat, voice, ...). The reason so many people in specific tech circles are mad about top posting I think is because specific tech circles still do text based mailing lists as a form of persistent group communication.

leephillips 7y ago
I work with a some organizations where it's common for an email conversation to develop with six to 12 participants. Now and then someone suggests one of these other solutions, and we try it, but always come back to email. If you use a capable email client, such as mutt, it's really not much of a problem.
u801e 7y ago
> The reason so many people in specific tech circles are mad about top posting I think is because specific tech circles still do text based mailing lists as a form of persistent group communication. Discussions on mailing lists are typically in depth and not just one line responses to one line questions, so top-posting would make it much more difficult to engage in those discussions. Though, I've never really understood the use of a mailing list over a private moderated newsgroup that people could subscribe to.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  What does a newsgroup offer in 2020 that a discourse instance or similar doesn’t? It feels like text from the same category as the text-only mailing list.
  - u801e 7y ago
    The ability to use your own client. For instance, I can use Thunderbird. Another person can use XNews. A third person could use gnus. Many news clients have sophisticated client side filtering capabilities. I haven't used discord, but based on some brief google searches, these appear to be features that discord lacks that news clients have.

juped 7y ago

Gmail is why, right? It's not because of any feature of top posting or bottom posting, it's because a generation of nerds grew up using Gmail. (It also mangles threading headers, or did the last time I had the misfortune of long threads with Gmail users.)

dnh44 7y ago

What's worse is that almost no one prunes the quoted emails, so you end up with extraordinarily long emails with a bunch of useless quoted text, most of which are signatures and legal disclaimers, repeated endlessly. I've given up on fighting the top posting fight and instead try to lead by example by pruning the quoted text so only relevant text is quoted.

falcolas 7y ago
What is irrelevant to one person is relevant to another. So by pruning down to what we think is important, we have removed context someone else added to the thread later may need. Long quoted sections of emails are ugly, but they do a great job of preserve the context for anyone to follow.
- dnh44 7y ago
  You make a good point about providing context to people added to the thread later, but it would still only provide partial context because people don't always reply to the most recent email in a thread. Also it's quite common for multiple people in a thread to respond to the same email near simultaneously, or for people to reply to a message earlier in the timeline. This then creates branches in the message history. The conversation is then likely to settle again at some point on one of the branches and any recent additions to the CC list are still going to miss context. Also at some time you have to consider that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Is it really useful to have a 5 word email nested 15 quotes and 1000 lines deep when 80% of the quoted lines are just signatures and disclaimers? The signal to noise ratio is just too low for it to be useful. I've just pulled up an email from a customer today and their signature has 33 lines, 133 words, and 1100 characters AFTER the name and company name. It even includes the email address which is the same as the address they used to send the message. I know that when I'm added to such a thread that I'll generally just make a phone call to a colleague to get up to date rather than try to make sense of everything. I personally don't have the patience for it. The irony of the whole thing is that this is what passes for professional communication today. The groups of misfits, slackers, and stoners I hung out with on the BBS's of the 90's had better online communication skills than today's corporate world. Anyway sorry for ranting, it's not directed at you, it's directed at the eternal september that most of us live in now. Your point about preserving context is a good one I hadn't considered but I think some pruning would go a long way towards making that context more accessible and useful.

datenwolf 7y ago

I was socialized in the early days of the Internet, were TOFU posting was nearly on the same level as a cardinal sin. I didn't think much of it when I started doing correspondence with the corporate world: More than once when distilling emails and do inline quoting I've been accused of distorting the correspondence and should follow "proper" ettiquete. People never questioned TOFU, they just took the default mode of a certain email client as gospel, as a law written in stone, the ultimate authority. I've long given up. Text compresses well and all those redundant quotes are made short work of by even by the most naive Huffman tree coder.

GistNoesis 7y ago

Asynchronous multi party messaging is a tangled mess. Top posting is an emergent phenomenon from using the wrong tool (e-mail) for the job. Basically when you reply to all, you acknowledged which information you have received from and read, and you communicate that to the other participants by transmitting your whole history of your current view of the thread, leaving users the ability to manually do some Paxos if they want to be able to agree on a consistent shared view. Email clients have to recourse to some black magic to merge the threads correctly. If you ever have tried to use email to constitute list of players for a football game where each participant add its name to the list you will quickly find that there are some errors and you got either some missing players or some extra. Because when two people answer simultaneously, the merging is not trivial to do and depends on the mail client. There are also some issues with spam filters or max number of people in conversation which sometimes exclude some people from the conversation. So very quickly history of views can't be merged, and of course it fails silently. There are also probably some accidentally quadratic problems there, but storage is cheap.

Chris2048 7y ago

Is there an email spec that actually hashes posts, and allows new emails to just refer to the hash it is responding to, and the thread hash-graph. And perhaps as some metadata, some former posts w/ hashes.

vidarh 7y ago
Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers provides this. Hashing a post is a hard problem, because an MTA can change the encoding of the message in all kinds of ways, so you'd first need to specify a canonical form for the message. But it's also unnecessary if you can trust the sending mail server to add a Message-ID field that is unique (which it can do however it wants to, and then ensure global uniqueness by appending its hostname; note that a client needs to take a bit of care because of course a broken server may not enforce uniqueness). A harder to solve problem is that it takes very few broken mail clients participating in a thread before it causes a mess.
- Chris2048 7y ago
  The thing about a hash though, is any client could create the hash, or verify it. You could even have consensus ala blockchain type thing. I guess if we use message-id, then a signed message from the mailserver with the message id would do. But signed messages still usually contain a hash of the thing they sign, no?
  - vidarh 7y ago
    You could rely on DKIM signatures for that, potentially. But lots of systems don't generate DKIM signatures. All systems generate message id's. Using message-id's for threading has literally worked for decades when the clients supports the relevant headers. It's not the message-id that is the problem, but lack of support for the headers carrying them.
jcranmer 7y ago
Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References are the standard way of doing this for anything using a .eml-like format (this includes both email and Usenet). Message-IDs are supposed to be unique according to the specification. In practice, you can get non-uniqueness if a message is reinjected into the mail system (say you send a message to a mailing list: both the original message you wrote, and the slightly-rewritten message sent out will use the same Message-ID). It works well enough that the way every mail client actually groups messages into threads... is to use these headers. So not only is there already an email spec, everybody already supports that spec.

sys_64738 7y ago

This post exhibits a lot of the problems with long emails in that it doesn't get straight to the point. People don't have time to read your prose when they simply want the relevant data. Get to the point immediately. Top posting won because of M$ Exchange.

blaser-waffle 7y ago

I don't know why this matters so much. Most, maybe 95%, of my emails don't need something in-line or require quotes from other emails. And the handful of times they do then chances are it's going to be a long, complicated email anyway, so I'm cool doing it by hand.

mrmanner 7y ago
I’ve had a slightly buggy mail setup that can’t quote email sent from Outlook for a few months now. So what I’ve done for shorter replies is simply delete the entire fudged quote and write my response. It works all the time, except for exceptionally complicated cases that wouldn’t be helped by quoting a random messy email thread anyway.

bachmeier 7y ago

Top posting won because that's what makes sense to most of the world. You're having a conversation with someone. You want to open the latest email and see their response. You don't want to dig through all that other information. I understand that there are a few oddball exceptions. For the vast, vast majority of email exchanges, top posting is more efficient.

saagarjha 7y ago
Of course, decent mail clients should make it so that it doesn't matter either way…
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  And so they did, but the internet grew on the era of non-mature software. Mail clients kept being abandoned before they became decent, while people moved to a new platform.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  That's an interesting, and non-trivial, suggestion. I would love to see mail clients try to figure out, given several raw messages, what the flow of the conversation/thread is like, then offer a canonical representation of that conversation, with perhaps a focus on what a single message contributed to the whole. Or one of several representations, among which the user chooses. That would be quite neat - but like I said, it's not at all easy
  - ColinWright 7y ago
    Yup, that's what my tool does. It wasn't easy, it doesn't always get it right, but it's pretty good, and makes complex email conversations usable, even when people top-post.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
narag 7y ago
Top posting won because that's what makes sense to most of the world. I don't think so. Actually I don't think top posting has "won". What has won is not caring about how you reply and going with what happens when you do nothing. People that top post never looks much at the quotes. They stop reading when they reach the blue lines. They read a couple quoted lines at best. So it's not a question of where you place the quoted text, but a question of if you use quoted text at all.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Do E-Mails have an identifier that tells what was replied to ? I don’t think there is but if there existed such a marker then you build a very nice tree structure.

alexjm 7y ago
Yes, that's the In-Reply-To header. It contains the unique message identifier from the Message-ID field of the email you're replying to. See also https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822 sections 4.6.1 and 4.6.2
- leephillips 7y ago
  And that's what mature email clients use to present thread trees, to help make sense out of email conversations. Gmail, etc., are not mature email clients.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    Observe, furthermore, that References: was in part designed so that a MUA/NUA could reconstruct a tree even if some intermediate messages were missing.

saagarjha 7y ago

Top posting is actually quite useful for context when you've been CC'd on a thread in the middle: you can go back through the previous mails that are embedded at the bottom of the email and reconstruct the chain in your head. And one you've done that, you can just recollapse the quoted content and it won't bother you again for the rest of the thread. (You're using a mail client that automatically collapses this kind of thing, right? I do hope that the complaints about "visual noise" aren't just people pining for this feature…)

u801e 7y ago
> Top posting is actually quite useful for context when you've been CC'd on a thread in the middle: you can go back through the previous mails that are embedded at the bottom of the email and reconstruct the chain in your head. That's a lot of work for someone to establish context, and they have to start at the bottom to read the original message, scroll up to find the second message, read through that, and repeat the process. What's useful is to provide a summary of what was discussed and then follow up from there. In either case, having some type of forum or newsgroup would be far better in this scenario because anyone subscribed could read any message even if they weren't part of the original discussion.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury of getting someone to relay an accurate and detailed summary of the thread so far when I get added mid-way. Reading quoted, often heavily mangled content isn’t pleasant but it’s a very good way to establish this context, and in lieu of the actual messages I consider it the next best option. And since you can’t predict who or where a message might be forwarded, I think it’s good to do this consistently so that it’s available as a fallback by default.

sarah180 7y ago

Can we also talk about CR vs LF and HTML vs plain emails? They're equally relevant discussions and totally not things that have been settled for ages by everyone but the obsessed.

u801e 7y ago
> Can we also talk about CR vs LF Based on my understanding of the SMTP protocol, lines in emails should be terminated with CRLF. > HTML vs plain emails Thunderbird has a nice setting (View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text) that takes HTML emails and renders them as plain text (complete with the / /, * *, and _ _ for italicized, bold, and underlined text respectively). Personally, I wish they would remove support for rendering HTML in emails and just display plain text. URLs would have to be manually copied and pasted into a web browser. That would make phishing emails far less effective.

hota_mazi 7y ago

The simple truth is that inline replying represents a massive cognitive load. Not just for the writer but for all the recipients. Not only does the email become very verbose with a lot of repeated paragraphs and psychedelic colors, it's also often content that you are already familiar with and don't really need to read again. Most email threads take place over a 24-48 hours period, which is enough for most people to have the context fresh in their mind, so top posting is a net gain for everyone. What is a very bad habit, though, is people not trimming long threads, especially when they forward such discussions.

atq2119 7y ago
The "psychedelic colours" are a really unfortunate consequence of the fact that Outlook is still incapable of producing sanely quoted text after about 20 years. It's extremely frustrating considering that most email clients did it right back then. Even Gmail manages to get it mostly right most of the time.

war1025 7y ago

What is top posting? Couldn't find a definition in the article and seems that everyone here in the comments already knows what it means.

sampleinajar 7y ago
top-posting (in which the reply precedes the quoted original message) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
frosted-flakes 7y ago
Your reply goes on top of the conversation, instead of embedded within it.
tirpen 7y ago
There used to be a big debate about where the reply should be placed when replying to an email. Bottom-posting means the reply is placed below what it's replying to, like in any normal conversation. This is the obviously correct choice. Top-posting means that the reply is placed above what you're replying to, completely unintuitively and against how things works in every other context. This is obviosly wrong and bad, but is the hell we have to live with when mailing these days.
jcranmer 7y ago
Historically, the facetious reply would be to give this example: A: Because it breaks the flow of information. Q: Why is it frowned upon? A: Putting replies above the original post. Q: What is top posting?

zzo38computer 7y ago

I do not do top posting myself. For email, I am using Heirloom-mailx which only does bottom posting (if I can get external editor to work, then I can make it doing properly). For NNTP (I wrote my own client in 2019), I always use interleaved posting, deleting the part of the message which is not relevant and adding the reply after the quoted part which is being replied to. For web forums I also do the same (but would prefer they switch to NNTP instead, or to support both which may be better). I don't use HTML email, and I don't like HTML email. Plain text is better.

hzhou321 7y ago

The work involved in an effective inline reply is to snip out the irrelevant quote yet still leave enough context for what you were replying to. An inline reply with a large amount of irrelevant quotes so that people have to hunt down your reply is bad. An email client that does not keep a thread and people can't effectively trace back old posts to recall context is bad. A default rich text preference is bad. Email client can easily apply some heuristics or honoring something mark-down-like, but the base need be always in plain text.

tatersolid 7y ago
> A default rich text preference is bad. Email client can easily apply some heuristics or honoring something mark-down-like, but the base need be always in plain text. I’m a grey beard, using email since the early 1990s. All these years later, I’ve realized HTML email is better in every way than plain-text email. Basically, you get every “feature” of plain-text plus important semantic additions like hierarchical lists, <strong>, <em>, <h#>, <figure>, <blockquote> etc. that improve clarity of communication drastically. HTML email can and should be about much more than fonts and colors. A forum like LKML is basically useless without these, but they insist on old-Skool plain text which makes readability suffer greatly.

cpcallen 7y ago

The comments here seem to be divided between two groups: 1. Those who were net denizens pre-Outlook, who grew up with sophisticated mail and news clients that properly threaded discussions, along with strong cultural norms to reply inline, trim quoted messages, and keep signatures short. 2. Those whose first experiences with email were post-Outlook, for whom the norm has always been top-posting. It's hardly surprising that each group regards the other with suspicion, but I think it's really telling that all the people who regard email as a bad tool for managing lengthy, in-depth discussions between multiple people seem to fall into the second camp.

btilly 7y ago
I am in group 1 and this is exactly right. Top posting limits the complexity of discussion that can be had to what can be kept in working memory of the people involved. Which makes it impossible to have a conversation that tracks multiple parallel ideas at once. I miss the days when that kind of conversation used to be common on Usenet. If you've never experienced it, there is no way to describe what it was like.
- globular-toast 7y ago
  It is still available on mailing lists. But those are becoming increasingly rare today. I really hope things turn around and people ditch the heavy, proprietary clients and childish stickers and rediscover the power of plain text communication.
- anitil 7y ago
  I think I'm misunderstanding what you're describing here. To me this sounds like what I go to Reddit or HN for. How does it differ?
  - u801e 7y ago
    HN and Reddit require far more scrolling to go through all the comments, and make it difficult to find recently posted comments (though Reddit has this feature if you have reddit gold or are a moderator of a subreddit). A typical newsreader shows a thread index overview which, even for thousands of posts, doesn't require that much scrolling, and makes it easy to see new posts within the thread.

unsignedint 7y ago

From my observations, top posting sometimes gives misguided sense of security, particularly when they are not seeing the whole picture of how E-mail works. I've seen couple of people in the past with habit of keeping just the most recent message, because they think the "history is all there" and want declutter their inbox. It's a bad practice, but they just couldn't see the possibility someone changing the history. They had hard time when someone decided to prune the old portions, or reply inline without leaving the whole text intact.

edflsafoiewq 7y ago

On web forums, bottom posting has obviously won. I can't remember ever seeing someone top post on reddit. OTOH twitter appears to have top posting baked into its UI.

einpoklum 7y ago

> Some email clients make it nearly impossible to use in-line replies, and people just won't do it. Indeed. This is somewhat annoying in Thunderbird and nearly impossible in Outlook. > People won't do work unless it's rewarding, or compulsory. ... I'm working on that. Has the author been working on that? I wonder. Two years have passed, after all.

ColinWright 7y ago
Yes, I have, and I now have a system I use privately within a circle of friends, and with some of my company business. Works a treat, and allows complex discussions that branch, merge, and more. I now also have an experimental tool that imports from email threads, and re-exports back to standard email formats. It will never be widely adopted. It's unlikely to reach a level of maturity that would make it acceptable to the muggles, but for us it is incredibly productive.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Have you considered integrating this system into, say, Thunderbird, or some other FOSS GUI mail client?
  - ColinWright 7y ago
    I don't have the skills, and I don't have the inclination to acquire the skills. I have more work than I have time to complete, and taking on the task of learning everything I'd need to learn to then integrate this into someone else's project is just not feasible. Currently the tool works brilliantly, but it's not robust, and it's certainly not foolproof. It's not even average-person-proof. It's insufficiently mature, and if I were to try to integrate it with another mail tool, I wouldn't start from here ... it would need a complete re-write. So yes, I have considered it, and with my background, skill-set, and availability, it's not going to happen.

einpoklum 7y ago

Actually, when you think about it, HN comments are basically a big pile of top-post replies, don't you think? (except for those people who quote a few lines prepended with > symbols)

ColinWright 7y ago
No, they're bottom-post replies, without the quoting of context (with a few exceptions). So you can read from top to bottom without having to bounce up'n'down trying to find the thread.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  You see the replies first and foremost, and the original article only if you click a link. Top-post in that sense.