
Why Top Posting Has Won (2018) - ColinWright
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WhyTopPostingHasWon.html
======
cpcallen
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
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.

~~~
anitil
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?

~~~
btilly
The standard used to be that replies and the original content were mixed. This
made it easy to reply to every point made by the previous person, and easy to
see what was skipped.

As opposed to what happens here which is that when I go to reply to someone, I
first read, form an understanding, and then reply to my understanding. It is
extremely rare to find people going through what someone said point by point
and agreeing or disagreeing with each bit.

If you've ever experienced that style of discussion, it is clearly superior
for complex discussions. If you haven't experienced it, it is very hard to
understand how it might possibly work.

(I often reply here by quoting several points in italics and replying
separately to each. That is a strictly inferior to what used to happen,
though, because they don't have a way to do the same back and keep straight
what they said before, what I said in reply, and how they are correcting my
reply.)

~~~
OrderlyTiamat
This is still a standard in a couple of blogs that I follow, when different
bloggers have back and forths.

The comments of those blogs also tend to follow this style (especially if both
bloggers end up in the same comment section)

------
mshook
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.

~~~
upofadown
Gmail is bad in lots of ways but it is free. It's a case of "What do you want
for nothing?".

Outlook OTOH is something that a business usually pays for. Someone should be
able to walk into that business and do a presentation for something that just
blows Outlook away. But that never happens, even these days when Microsoft is
not the monopoly it used to be.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
If only gmail was free. I made a mistake some years ago and accidentally
dropped out of the "free" category. It now costs me US$12/month (along with
whatever other gapps i want, mostly). No way to go back (without using a new
email address; since I own my own domain, that's not happening).

~~~
jdofaz
If you use google as your registrar they will forward to gmail (or anywhere)
for free.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
I don't think fixes it. Once you fall into the pay-for-google hole, I don't
think you can get out of it.

------
babuskov
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
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
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.

------
datenwolf
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.

------
grey-area
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
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.

------
dnh44
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
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
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.

~~~
falcolas
I can certainly see your point, but in my experience of late, email
communication is rarely used to host lively communication. It's killer in this
role was IRC, Slack, Discord, and other real-time communication channels. It's
not until this live communication has come to a head that email is used to
preserve the decisions and forward them to leadership or outside companies.

So while some intelligent pruning may be of use, it's been made much less
valuable over time. I've been added to a few lengthy email chains late in the
process, and the lack of pruning was not even really noticeable.

~~~
u801e
> It's killer in this role was IRC, Slack, Discord, and other real-time
> communication channels.

Yet, there isn't a single instant messaging client/platform that I know of
that puts new messages at the top of the window instead of at the bottom.

I think the root of the problem is that people want to treat email as a chat
client where only the few words or line at the top matter, and, conversely,
people want to treat chat clients (i.e., Slack) like a discussion that needs
threading where responses need to be associated with the text that it was in
response to.

------
rmu09
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.

------
bachmeier
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
Of course, decent mail clients should make it so that it doesn't matter either
way…

~~~
einpoklum
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
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.

------
vidanay
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
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
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
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).

------
saagarjha
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
> 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
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.

------
blaser-waffle
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
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.

------
sys_64738
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.

------
alkonaut
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.

~~~
u801e
> 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
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
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.

~~~
alkonaut
> The ability to use your own client.

You will always have limitations. I think it's safe to say that most people
consider "no images" or "no UTF" to be much more limiting than "no custom
clients" or "no terminal support".

Btw I said "discourse" not "discord" (but both are useful for communication -
the latter is a realtime voice app popular among gamers. The former is likely
the best forum implementation around).

~~~
u801e
> I think it's safe to say that most people consider "no images"

These can be done via attachments depending on the rules of the newsgroup

> or "no UTF"

That's entirely a client-side issue. Thunderbird, for example, has no problem
rendering UTF-8 characters in email or newsgroups.

> Btw I said "discourse" not "discord"

Ah, I thought you had made a typo. I have not heard of discourse, and it
doesn't appear that you can use it in offline mode (like you could with an
email/news client. As for the other features like images, url embedding, etc.,
they are features I don't personally find very useful and they also detract
from the actual content (based on my experience using Slack). In fact, I
disable all those features in Slack so that I don't have to deal with constant
visual distraction of animated gifs or emojis. Looking at
discourse.ubuntu.com, it doesn't make it obvious who replied to whom via a
nested threaded structure like you would see here on HN or on reddit, and
there's no thread overview pane where you can jump to a post you're interested
in.

It also seems to rely on central based moderation rather than allowing for
client side moderation. That is, moderation that's entirely within the
client's control rather than relying on an administrator.

> The former is likely the best forum implementation around).

Yet, sites like HN or reddit that don't normally show images, animated emojis
or show URL previews work well for their intended audience. But even those
websites make it difficult to see new posts since you last viewed the thread
and jump to posts you're interested in.

------
hota_mazi
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
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.

------
CJefferson
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
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
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
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.

~~~
CJefferson
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Going off a complete tangent (and this is why I love tree-shaped forums vs.
linear forums - I can do that without disrupting the rest of the discussion):

> _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 never understood why that's seen as a negative. What's the point of having a
conversation if longer messages and point-by-point discussions are
discouraged? The opposite of that is a shallow conversation that doesn't
explore the discussed space. I like when people inline-reply to my larger
e-mails, because this way I know what they're referring to, and don't have to
parse out their attempts at describing in words which parts of an e-mail
they're commenting on.

~~~
CJefferson
It's because, on mailing lists, I find those kinds of conversations can often
have a low signal/noise ratio. Not always, but sometimes you end up with
massive threads that go on for weeks, with increasingly huge messages.

That's not to say that always happens of course.

~~~
ColinWright
Agreed, but that's where judicious blocking and muting become essential,
possibly on a discussion-by-discussion basis.

That will always be the case in a free-for-all such as mailing lists or
forums, rather than a discussion between colleagues/friends.

------
unsignedint
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.

------
sarah180
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
> 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.

------
juped
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.)

------
zzo38computer
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
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
> 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.

------
Ididntdothis
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
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
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
Observe, furthermore, that References: was in part designed so that a MUA/NUA
could reconstruct a tree even if some intermediate messages were missing.

------
war1025
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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?

------
einpoklum
> 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
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
Have you considered integrating this system into, say, Thunderbird, or some
other FOSS GUI mail client?

~~~
ColinWright
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.

------
njkleiner
The site is down for me, here[0] is an archived copy.

[0]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solip...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200407075946/https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WhyTopPostingHasWon.html?td07hn2)

~~~
ColinWright
My ISP is currently investigating ...

 _Edit:_ Now fixed ... by coincidence there was a DDOS on the machine hosting
my site. Should now be OK.

------
GistNoesis
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
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
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
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
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.

------
edflsafoiewq
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
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
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
You see the replies first and foremost, and the original article only if you
click a link. Top-post in that sense.

