
Abandoning bottom-posting - jefftk
http://www.jefftk.com/news/2013-02-16
======
tmhedberg
Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become
a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and
Internet communication in general. While I'd certainly prefer it if everyone I
corresponded with followed proper quoting etiquette, I have to say that it's
also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able
to infer with reasonable confidence what level of expertise to expect from the
stranger on the other end (at least in the context of public technical
discussions).

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

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

~~~
mattmanser
Seriously?

I have come to associate this particular style as meaning the emailer/poster
is going to be an unhelpful, holier than thou, pedantic ass-hole.

It's a shibboleth without doubt, but not for the clique you think.

> I was walking down the street

Better known as a sidewalk

> when I had a revelation

Oh what pray tell?

>that not many people actually use NoSQL

There's a distinction between idiots and people you fail to comprehend.

> And so I no longer worried that I used relational databases

What the poster here fails to understand because of his miniscule brain is
that NoSQL is so fundamentally superior to relational databases that only an
idiot would use any other thing. It's not even worth saying. Though I took the
trouble just now to enlighten this poorly educated OP who obviously shouldn't
ever touch a computer again.

~~~
tmhedberg
I agree that inline replies, when taken to the extreme that you illustrate,
are more asinine than they are useful. Personally, I tend to reply to a
paragraph or two at a time, a style which doesn't, in my opinion, have the
same "you idiot" rhetorical feel. It's just easier to read and understand than
a giant block of text responding to several unrelated points, followed by a
giant untrimmed quote. Not all bottom posting/inline quoting is of the holier-
than-thou nature. :)

~~~
mattmanser
True, there is a difference, that is a style you tend to to see on the more
technical mailing groups.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
venus
> Communicating well takes an extraordinary amount of time and the speed with
> which most internet communications take place precludes quite a bit of the
> work that should go into it.

Good point, well taken, but only applies to casual conversation environments
such as here.

Do we need to establish a "best practise" for environments where accurate
communication is imperative, eg diplomatic offices, and how would we go about
doing so?

------
lutusp
The article misses the point that abandoning bottom -posting only works if you
don't quote content from the message you're replying to. If you do, then by
all means bottom-post.

The worst case is a long exchange with multiple participants, all quoted, some
top-posters and some bottom-posters.

And finally, if you quote multiple passages and reply to them individually
within a single post (as I often do), you simply must bottom-post or your
message will be incomprehensible.

As far as I'm concerned, a top-poster is either a narcissist or very
inexperienced in Internet communications. Or both.

~~~
viraptor
> As far as I'm concerned, a top-poster is either a narcissist or very
> inexperienced in Internet communications. Or both.

I bet you've not been exposed to many corporate email chains. Top-posting
makes a lot of sense there. I often get copied on an email chains from which
only the last part affects me. For example it will be a long discussion about
some task and then I'll get copied because I'm the person who does X and need
to help out. Bottom posting wouldn't work here for a number of reasons:

\- I don't care about the project and its planning 20 emails ago - but I still
may need some information from those emails. What I need is the task (at the
very top) and context if required (at the bottom).

\- If anyone tried to edit the history by removing unnecessary parts, they'd
most likely remove the parts not important to them, but later on same
questions would get repeated as soon as new people join the conversation.

\- Leaving all needed parts and bottom posting / replying inline would result
in 20+ levels of nesting and each inline section would become its own thread.
This is just not possible to manage without some public archive with thread
support.

Both styles have sense in different environments. I bottom-post to public
mailing lists, because it makes more sense there. I top-post to other people
at work where exchange==email, because it makes more sense there.

I used to bring up the same argument and the same quote about why top-posting
is bad - but I guess I was wrong - I just didn't see the issue from the other
side at that point. This makes me think that people top-posting in html on
public mailing lists simply don't understand the other side either, but may
adjust with time. As long as we don't assume either side is narcissistic and
allow the possibility that we're not experienced in every possible scenario of
Internet communication, we may just get along... Just try to adjust to the
audience and environment sometimes. This may mean top-posting to some office;
as well as fighting with your POS outlook to allow you to bottom-post to a
mailing list in plaintext without any attachments.

~~~
ScottBurson
There's another reason bottom- (or interspersed) posting does not work well in
corporate email chains: Outlook flatly doesn't support it. Quoted text in a
reply is not indented by default. The replier has to do extra work to put
their reply in a different font or color so it's clear what's quoted text and
what's new text.

~~~
dredmorbius
Which utterly breaks for those who read the thread on a text-only mailer
(e.g.: mutt).

~~~
InclinedPlane
"Doc, it hurts when I go like this."

"Then stop going like that."

~~~
dredmorbius
Or any mailer which doesn't present the highly-styled formatting of Microsoft
Outlook as created by the author. Which would be, again, any text-based
client, many mobile mail clients, and others. Pretty much anything _but_
Microsoft Outlook.

Other enterprise clients are similarly bad. Lotus Notes, and others (though
these are the two most commonly found ones).

Straight text is much more fungible and portable than highly-specified
formats. There's a reason technical email etiquette and formatting rules
emerged, though yes, contemporary business and non-technical use is diverging
from these practices.

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

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

Exceptions can be two mostly:

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

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

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

\---

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

------
zdw
If top posting is so awesome, why aren't the comments on his blog above the
text?

~~~
laureny
Because a blog post is different from an email discussion.

------
michaelfeathers
Email is broke to the degree that we have to think about this. Maybe even
more.

~~~
cbr
You no longer have to think about it. Just send your message in the way that's
the default for your mail client, and modern mail readers like gmail will make
it easy for your readers to get appropriate context.

------
betterunix
Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the
thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam,
and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of
an email just to see what I missed.

It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not
replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a certain
level; people who top post routinely ignore the quoted text.

I guess the point of the article is not that bottom posting should die, but
that _quoting messages at all_ should die. Remove quoted text or make it
optional, and the bottom/top posting argument goes away entirely. If you
assume everyone receives all messages anyway, what is the point of quoting?

(Edit: Personally, I would rather not give up quoting, because messages may be
lost and I would like to see whatever context I missed. It is also nice to see
the context of a reply; "That is a bad idea!" could refer to anything in a
message, bottom posting helps to clear it up.)

~~~
0x0
Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is
threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus,
top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.

~~~
betterunix
"Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is
threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi"."

Agreed, see my edit; I would rather not see quoting go the way of the dodo.
Unfortunately, top-posting discourages quoting entirely; the quoted text just
piles up at the bottom of the message, easily turning into hundreds of
kilobytes of text, until someone is kind enough to delete it (usually a
bottom-posting sort of person).

"Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To
headers."

Shouldn't that be done automatically by one's email client?

~~~
0x0
Outlook at least used to be a big offender in not including those headers.

~~~
emillon
Blackberry too, and I suspect a few webmail clients.

------
tdavis
_shrug_ I will always bottom-post when context matters and always top-post
when I expect the reader to know the context implicitly. And I will never read
an email chain that requires me to start from the bottom and work my way up.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
Aardwolf
I don't bother with it. I ignore it.

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

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

------
mindcrime
I'll give up bottom posting (and inline posting) when I die. Well, that's what
I _want_ my position to be anyway. But, truth be told, it's a lot of work to
re-jigger things for bottom posting with many modern email clients. And so I
do find myself sometimes falling back to top-posting out of laziness -
especially when emailing from my phone using GMail.

Most of the time, however, I bottom post. Maybe I'm just showing my age, but
top-posting kinda annoys me. Now you kids get off of my lawn.

------
chaz
I've always top posted because it details the entire history of who said what
and when to people that may be added to the discussion later or forwarded to
another party as an FYI. They don't have previous context without the whole
thread available.

------
Tangaroa
I used to bottom-post until I noticed that I was the only person doing it over
several years of communication, and that following the old convention now made
_me_ look like the newbie who doesn't know how to use email.

Top-posting is efficient for single responses to single-issue threads because
it brings the newest and most relevant message to the forefront. Context is
not a problem for most messages because readers who have been following the
discussion can get sufficient context from the sender and subject line. For
the minority of messages where it is a problem, the parent post is right after
the text. Context does become a bigger problem when there is a long thread
with multiple users discussing multiple topics using the same subject line, as
often used to happen on Usenet but which I have rarely seen in email.

I will still inline-post if replying to multiple issues in a long post like in
old Usenet debates.

