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Why top posting has won (2018)
- throwanem 1y agoImagine mistaking courtesy for procrastination. But to see this writer focus obsessively on the inessential is hardly novel. What in any case may one expect of someone who doesn't even bother introducing his topic until two-thirds of the way through the piece? Even in my forties I barely remember there was ever an argument about this. Are there still enough crusties left alive who care to sustain the discussion?
- charcircuit 1y agoIt's just the default behavior when clicking the reply button. The reason why people don't top post on Discord or any other messaging software is because it doesn't do it by default.
- card_zero 1y agoIt wasn't always. I was raised to reply at the bottom, in Eudora. Then Outlook changed everybody to replying at the top in order to be obnoxiously modern or something, in the late 90s I think.
- Aurornis 1y agoThe reason why people don’t top post on Discord is the same reason our terminal apps scroll older lines upward. That’s the convention for active scrolling text. E-mail readers have people switching from document to document and starting anew with each. When viewing documents we start at the top, and the reply is the most prescient thing to see.
- richard_mcp 1y agoI find it to be the exact opposite. Replying in-line is great when it's a short email between a two people. But if the email is to a wide audience, has multiple back and forths, or new people get CC-ed later, in-line posting is much more difficult to follow. It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out who said what while also keeping state of all the different threads. Top posting takes more effort to do well, but makes it much easier to follow an email chain.
- layer8 1y agoThe point of inline replies is to quote just enough to establish the context of the reply, and to enable replying to multiple separate points without having to separately establish each point as context. Case in point: > It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out who said what Email clients used to color each quoting level, and mails started with something like: John Doe wrote on $date: > Jane Smith wrote on $date: > > Joe Shmoe wrote on $date: > > > what they wrote > > what they wrote > what they wrote and you knew that Jane was green and Joe was cyan. The respective points were also closer together, so you had to scroll less than you have nowadays. > while also keeping state of all the different threads. That’s why we had threaded views that showed messages in a tree, and showed when the subject (line) changed. People were encouraged to edit the subject line to reflect topic drift, so that you had a good overview when looking at the thread visualization, which would omit repetitions of the same subject text and only show where it changed. Example (threaded view at top, colored quotes at bottom): https://robot.unipv.it/clipedia/images/mutt-threads.png https://robot.unipv.it/clipedia/images/mutt-threads.png
- zvr 1y agoBut this doesn't really work in long emails and threads. Scroll a couple of screens in the message text and you see something like: > > > > I think that ... > > No, I remember that ... > On the contrary, I believe that ... (maybe with different colors) but you have to remember the stack/colors to decipher who is saying what. Unfortunately I have not seen mutt coloring the index with the same colors as the quoted text, which would help a lot (if you have a view that shows the index along with the message).
- linker3000 1y agoI didn't know there was a competition.
- junon 1y agoIt's been one of those "tabs vs spaces"-like holy wars for a while.
- jghn 1y agoThis was a huge debate on USENET in particular, as well as in the email world until Outlook effectively made top posting the standard. RFC 1855 [1] makes it clear that the correct way is to quote relevant text and then reply. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855
- richardwhiuk 1y agoRFCs aren't really a suitable document for agreeing this sort of communication conventions.
- Aurornis 1y agoConsider yourself lucky. I’ve always adapted to the prevailing format of each mailing list, but the people who try to create a holy war out of different styles have always been insufferable. In a normal office environment e-mail moves much faster, people open threads with the context already in mind, and expect to see the relevant new info at the top. Bottom posting would either make everyone sigh heavily when they see an e-mail from that one person or would earn someone a quick coaching session to adopt the prevailing style of the office environment. But if you go on to a mailing list that wants bottom posting, that’s what you do. It’s a courtesy.
- almosthere 1y agoEmail was invented wrong, and there should not be top or bottom posting, but whatever. Instead the inventor should have made it so the previous content should have been in a special segment, and then the software could handle it from there.
- arp242 1y agoOkay! > the inventor Aside: email didn't really have "an inventor". Shiva Ayyadurai does not count. > should have made it so the previous content should have been in a special segment So how would you do this then, where you reply to a specific part?
- xp84 1y ago> how would you do this then, where you reply to a specific part? When specific context is needed, besides “the whole message” just do exactly as you and I are both doing right now. But in general, quoting the whole message is pointless unless you’re adding a new recipient on, since we all have the threads in our email clients anyway. Whenever I can, I nuke the entire quoted part out of my replies.
- AdamH12113 1y agoNeeds a (2018) added to the title -- the list of recent posts[1] gives the publication date as 2018-06-13. Incidentally: Bloggers, please put dates in your actual blog post templates. The date is an important part of the context of any article. [EDIT: The author of the article has already added the date to their template. Thanks!] [1] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html
- 38 1y ago100%. It's the most important piece of information. How anyone can forget to include it floors me
- altairprime 1y agoYou can email the mods to have them add that 2018 marking, so that it doesn’t depend on them random-chance seeing your comment; the footer contact link has the address.
- kens 1y agoI took the date out of my blog posts because I find the HN tic of putting the date in the title a little too precious. Obviously the date is important for some articles: the relevance of "Scientists make breakthrough in X" depends on the date. Otherwise it's just pointless enforcement of local custom, which by the way isn't in the submission guidelines.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoI agree, all the hall monitoring in the comments about titles is cringe.
- harshitaneja 1y agoEveryone should obviously be able to make decisions for their own content on their own websites/blog and more power to you for exercising your agency and choice here. I browsed through your blog and with your content on vintage computing and history, I can consume the content without having to care about a date. However, I don't find that to be the case for most of the written content I consume and knowing where some content was created temporally is important context more often than not(at least in my experience). Now, I can't nor would I want to dictate what others do on their own hosted content(where they generously share their hard meticulous work). Comments on HN and other places lamenting lack of dates however should be fair game to desire such additional context. But then again, you commenting back is just participating in the same dialogue so I guess my entire message has been just meandering.
- 38 1y agoJesus what a terrible blog. The post is not dated at all, which in my opinion is the single most important piece of information. Also no mobile layout, so I have to manually scroll like a typewriter to read each line. What decade are we in?
- akkartik 1y agoTop posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete dichotomy. I often encounter threads on mailing lists where people are replying inline but not trimming the part they're not replying to. That makes it hard to follow. Or they reply inline and trim well but it's still hard to follow because you need more context than just the part they're replying to. So the key is "the thread needs to be distilled" as OP puts it. And often that's more work than just finding the right sentence to quote. My approach these days in my email is: 99% of the time I quote nothing and delete everything my client puts into the compose window, relying on the default thread-view in most email clients to supply the context for my readers. 1% of the time I need to quote, and I quote liberally, treating words as a wiki, and editing/sculpting the text in '> ' just as much as my own reply below it.
- addaon 1y agoI agree. > Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete dichotomy. There are just so many options.
- benoliver999 1y agoYeah this is my strategy. The top/bottom post brigade are both happy and email clients seem to handle it well. It's kind of alarming to me that the default in say gmail is to constantly re-send the original message chain back and forth. I guess it then gives the whole chain to newcomers to the thread?
- photon_rancher 1y agoYeah and it prevents issues if the subject line changes in an unexpected way that confuses the email client, or issues where an email chain goes on for a long period of time but retention policies delete old emails. Etc…
- aniou 1y agoIt won because it was in place (Outlook) and almost nobody cares. Official version is: "because there is a whole history of correspondence and it is convenient to forward it to new participants". In reality? It doesn't matter. Almost no-one reads, neither top- or bottom-posted mails. But there is a drawback in top-posting and I mean a "my comments inside original post, in color/bold/with indent/randomly inserted between two phrases". There is no standard of citing in top-posting - thus sometimes original mail gone. Edited, re-edited and commented in various, inconsistent and often unreadable ways.
- travisb 1y agoIn my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anyways, then in my opinion this edge case is valuable enough to tip in the scales. I agree the difficulty quoting sucks, but that's mostly because of the switch from top posting to bottom posting. When people copy-and-paste the bit they are replying to and stay in the top posting paradigm things aren't so bad.
- mgaunard 1y agoMany people moved from Outlook to GMail. Unfortunately, GMail doesn't do it any better.
- fmbb 1y agoGmail makes it easier for top posters because it shows you the email threads. Outlook did not use to make it easy to follow threads at all.
- leephillips 1y agoExcept that Gmail fails to display threads correctly, as shown in detail here: https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/ https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
- SoftTalker 1y agoIf the mail reader does a good job organizing the thread, you don't need to quote the original at all in many cases, because the recipient can easily see the message that's being replied to. I wonder what the carbon footprint is for poorly threaded email clients that encourage including the entire thread in every reply.
- arp242 1y agoI think this hugely overthinks things and it's actually a lot simpler: Outlook and other Microsoft tools didn't support bottom-posting. It was only kind-of possible if you changed several settings and even then you had to manually change stuff in every reply. That by far the most important reason top-posting "won". I use past tense because I haven't used any of this Microsoft stuff for over 10 years, but I assume this is still the case. This sort of moves the question to "why did Outlook only support top-posting?" I don't have a clear answer to that, but if I look at the general state of Microsoft and email at the time then it's probably a combination of the Not-Invented-Here (and maybe some "EEE") attitude at Microsoft at the time combined with a general apathy and ignorance towards email.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYes exactly. The first text-based email clients I used that quoted the original message in a reply[1] defaulted to bottom posting. They'd include the message with the ">" prefix on each line, and your cursor would be positioned at the bottom of that. So at that time most people did inline or bottom replies. Microsoft Email/Exchange/Outlook as best I can remember have always defaulted to quoting the message and leaving the cursor at the top. And they didn't prefix the quoted text in any way, so to do inline replies you'd have to make it clear which text was quoted and which text was new. People would use colors or different fonts when "rich" text became supported but it was more work and most people just took the easy path. [1] Very early on, MUAs did not (at least by default) quote the original message. This was because most people were using teletypes or slow (300 baud) terminals and possibly a line-oriented editor such as 'ed' so quoting the original message could add significant extra time needed to compose a reply. Also, with a mail client that does proper threading, you can see which message is being replied to and you don't really need to include that again in the reply.
- rixed 1y agoThere is no such thing as "supporting [top/bottom] posting". You have a text editor and a cursor, the real alternative is not "top" vs "bottom" but "I care about the context of the discussion" vs "I don't care". In the first case, you edit the quoted text and then answer inline, and in the second you just type your one line answer and hit "send". Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
- csallen 1y agoI've always been fascinated by aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and those sorts of things. What is it that makes them so enduring, so satisfying, and so seemingly true? Why are we attracted to this form of expression moreso than longer and better-argued prose? Do things merely seem more true simply because they are wittily expressed, and if so, is that a good thing? (PG's recent essay had interesting things to say about this.) Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld: - "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us." - "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples" - "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong." - "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears." - "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice." - "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones." - "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them." My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place, because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the conclusions of others.
- CooCooCaCha 1y agoYour last paragraph fascinates me because I think it’s true. There’s something about being told things directly that pushes people away, but a clever aphorism disarms us because it makes us feel smart for “getting it”. There’s something inside us that prefers indirect communication.
- erikerikson 1y ago> There’s something inside us that prefers indirect communication. This may come from culture or neurodiversity. Some of us greatly prefer explicit communication.
- CooCooCaCha 1y agoSorry I forgot the standard caveats that generalizations don’t apply to everyone.
- malwarebytess 1y agoThe section on proverbs is missing the point, despite overthinking it. You're not meant to take a proverb and apply it literally in all cases. It's a piece of wisdom you pull out when you deem it appropriate. The analysis and individual judgement of the human being is implied. If you included more it wouldn't be a proverb.
- LastTrain 1y agoI feel like most of the authors annoyances and misunderstandings could be fixed with a bit of advice from my dad- “use your goddamn head”. Yes, a stitch in time doesn’t save nine each and every time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jagraff 1y agoI think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain. I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?
- ColinWright 1y agoI've written one, and people who use it, love it. People who look at it from the outside, hate it, hate on it, say hateful things about it, and generally make it clear that it should be set fire to, then buried. But I and colleagues use it regularly, and it absolutely hits the spot for non-linear discussions that are intended to find conclusions.
- mr_toad 1y ago> email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement It’s still better than a teams call.
- bornfreddy 1y agoAlmost anything is better than any Teams thing.
- dang 1y agoRelated: Why Top Posting Has Won (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 - April 2020 (140 comments) Why Top Posting Has Won - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302808 - June 2018 (3 comments)
- trueismywork 1y agoThe biggest advantage of top posting is that you can involve new people in middle of a thread and they have all the context without working harder.
- dasil003 1y agoI don't disagree that top posting is often the result of laziness, but I think the logical thread of the articles starts to break down at this point: > But when the thread is long, and when your reply is to a point deeper inside, suddenly the receiver has to do a lot of work. You, the sender, have saved yourself time, but the receiver has to do more work than you have saved. Potentially a lot more work. The problem is that readers are also lazy, and increasingly people don't have time to follow long threads at all. With inline responses, it's far too easy for threads to branch off in a million directions. Once that happens you'll often lose the forest for the trees. It's reasonable for usenet-style internet discussions where participation is voluntary and asynchronous by definition, but in work collaboration it's a strong anti-pattern. In a situation where there is a goal and desired outcome, top-posting is a reasonable way to keep a thread linear and outcome-focused. It can still break down for complex or controversial issues, but in that case email is the wrong medium, instead jump on a call or write a proposal.
- thom 1y agoIf you're feeling particularly nostalgic, you can just have an LLM take all your incoming email and tell it to rewrite it so it's no longer top-posted.
- neilv 1y agoOne of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the history of the email thread up to that point, but it's missing emails (because of concurrency with possibly multiple replies going on at once, and because of cherry-picking or randomly-picking which subtree to respond to). Even in a back-and-forth between 2 people, there are some people who'll reply a second time to the same email, not to replace their earlier response, but to add more information. (Aside: Also, it seems to be rare for people forwarded a top-posted thread context to actually read it, unless they're looking to assign blame.) In every company, I end up having to reconstruct context for someone, or do archaeology on some interaction, and the top-quoting both helps and hurts. Downsides of lazy top-posting for these purposes include having to break out all those messages, and fill in the gaps from maybe multiple copies at different points. Upsides include when, say, a single email is the only record, and the fact that a bunch of people top-posted means you have more raw information, in the quotes, than if that single email was in a history of people doing proper Netiquette with minimal quoting of the parts they were responding to. There are a whole bunch of reasons and implications for how things are done in corporate practice, and IME most of them come down to one of: poor tools, poor use of the tools (including by "digital natives"), and corporate misalignment + politics.
- thechao 1y agoOne thing I like about Slack-like message systems is that they naturally bottom post. However, they tend to go "asynchronous", which makes conversiarcheology nearly impossible. I don't understand why I can't click the message I want to reply to and have my response inserted at that point. (With an obvious: it's been too long to do that limiter.) The messages can stay inline, but having the user mark the dependency (even retroactively) could lead to some real tooling & conversation recovery improvements. I dunno; Slack has some sort of Canvas integration which I need like a new hole on my head.
- richardwhiuk 1y agoPeople already struggle to use threads in Slack correctly, adding arbitrary nesting of messages doesn't feel like it'd be an improvement.
- 3036e4 1y agoI surrendered a long time ago and started top-posting like normal people do, but a few times I wrote to someone and they replied the old way with just quotes and bottom-posting, and then I immediately revert to that mode myself. I wish there was some good way to silently communicate that preference to likeminded. Then I would know right away when to switch to proper netiquette without the other person having to go first. And how often was I in an email exchange with someone else that also prefer to not top-post, but both did that anyway since that is just the expectation now?
- tbrownaw 1y ago<span style="color: darkred; font-weight: bold">comments added below</span>
- ccppurcell 1y agoI have similar feelings about voice messages over chat apps. I pretty nearly always read it as "my time is more valuable than yours" especially if it's long. Listening on 2x speed is not as good as skim reading. It should go without saying that I make an exception for people with disabilities.
- chrismorgan 1y agoI moved to India and married an Indian last year. She and her coworkers are much less literate than me. (On the other hand, I can’t speak four languages!) They use voice messages in WhatsApp quite a bit, and I can see their value for such people. For my part, such is my preference for text I hadn’t even noticed audio messages were a thing—I was genuinely blind to that honkin’ big button!
- satvikpendem 1y agoIf you use a competent email software like Gmail, this is a non-issue.
- tzs 1y agoI remember this amusing argument against top posting that I saw on Usenet at least 20 years ago: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
- xyzzy123 1y agoThis makes me wonder if there's a class of software that doesn't exist yet. Like, a structured reasoning assistant? We have all these assistants for grammar and spelling but nothing for the actual thinking bit. We could go a lot further than auto-converting top-posts to inline. I'm imagining a cognitive prosthesis that would help you understand the structure and dependencies of someone's argument and would give you a "wavy red line" or list of points if what you're saying is irrelevant, incoherent or doesn't address the actual arguments being made. A big thing I value about inline posters is that I know they read the whole message. Doing the work of summarising and maintaining context signals to me that what they have to say might be worth reading, even if I disagree. It also signals they adhere to conventions around reasoning and discourse. Would providing computer tools for argument defeat the purpose though? Would it just help people pump out simulacra of thoughtful responses? Creating a tool to be weaponised by pedants and "motivated reasoners"? It might actually make it _harder_ to find signal in the noise. I feel like most people would start at the conclusion first, then use the tools to make the strongest version of their argument. A kind of "google maps for thinking" where the destination is already punched in. The computer would just be used to determine the most acceptable route to get there. In a perfect world, tools for thinking would help everyone undertand the territory better rather than being something that just helps your tanks drive over it :/
- Jackosas 1y ago[dead]
- librasteve 1y agoi think they mean cliché, not proverb