Why Top Posting Has Won

Needs 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.

[1] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html

Top 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I'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.

The 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.

I didn't know there was a competition.

Many people moved from Outlook to GMail.

Unfortunately, GMail doesn't do it any better.

It 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.

It'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.

Email 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.

Jesus 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?

Imagine 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?