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What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--
by jjwiseman 14y ago
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)
- mhd 14y agoThere's no big difference if the quoted part is small enough and you're replying in one go (although I'd argue that even there it breaks the historic flow of the conversation). It is a big of a hassle if you want to reply to parts of the original post, Usenet-style (y'know, before "Usenet" meant "less traceable file sharing"). There having the answer atop of each single paragraph you're responding to is seriously weird, it's like playing Jeopardy with email. Never mind that breaking up quoted text into parts is pretty buggy with gmail, due to the absence of quote chars (replaced by those colored bars).
- coldpie 14y agoThis old saw explains it pretty well: ======= 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 in e-mail? ======= As ever, there are exceptions, with one-on-one, serial email being the most prevalent. But if there's more than one recipient, top-posting is godawfully confusing.