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Comment by cpcallen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It is still available on mailing lists. But those are becoming increasingly rare today.

I really hope things turn around and people ditch the heavy, proprietary clients and childish stickers and rediscover the power of plain text communication.

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?

HN and Reddit require far more scrolling to go through all the comments, and make it difficult to find recently posted comments (though Reddit has this feature if you have reddit gold or are a moderator of a subreddit).

A typical newsreader shows a thread index overview which, even for thousands of posts, doesn't require that much scrolling, and makes it easy to see new posts within the thread.

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.)

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)

The reality is that since 99% of email users are "post-Outlook", one must "top post" or the others on the mail assume it's blank and just skip over it -- even if you "top post" a message about how you've replied inline.

If I'm on a list with established conventions or if my email partner requests it, I'm happy to have old-style "pre-Outlook" conversations, but I've learned my lesson in trying not to do it by default. It's not a convention that we're going to change.

At work I've seen often the [see inline] tag at top if someone did not top post. But yes, that was sadly the exception.

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