Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> I bet you've not been exposed to many corporate email chains. Top-posting makes a lot of sense there.

Yes, but only because replies don't typically intersperse quotes from the original. Once a choice is made to reply point by point, the argument for top-posting falls apart. So I imagine detailed quoting and replying, as opposed to simply replying, is rare.

Example original post:

"Here are my concerns, please provide a detailed response:"

"1. What about issue A?"

"2. Have you addressed issue B?"

"3. Item C has bothered many people in the front office."

And so forth. Replying in detail simply isn't meaningful without interspersing your replies with the original queries. And that, in turn, isn't possible if one top-posts.

To me, top-posting signals that the reply isn't (indeed, cannot be) a detailed response to the points made in the original. And maybe that doesn't matter, if people are talking past each other.

> Both styles have sense in different environments.

I think the above says it -- top-posting means you don't plan to reply in detail, point my point, as I'm doing right now.

Bottom-posting clearly signals that you read and understood every word of the original message. It is to post layout what the expression "I hear you" is to interpersonal relations.

Actually if someone asks you something point by point there's nothing to stop to you from copying the questions to your top post and replying "inline" there.

> Actually if someone asks you something point by point there's nothing to stop to you from copying the questions to your top post and replying "inline" there.

That would be neither top-posting nor bottom-posting. It would be a cybernetic chimera. :)

> (...) 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 (...)

This is actually a great argument for top-posting! Totally agree on this one.

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.

Smartphones too. I top-post from my iPhone, bottom-post everywhere else.

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

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

"Then stop going like that."

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.

> There's another reason bottom- (or interspersed) posting does not work well in corporate email chains: Outlook flatly doesn't support it.

Yes, I remember this now. It was an item on a long list of reasons I gave up on Windows years ago. But I'm not sure it counts as a "reason", because it's more an uncorrected defect. Even if you have good arguments to top-post, Outlook takes away your choice. Like Windows itself.

Agreed - top posting is how corporates do it.

Don't try to be the kid who doesn't play the game like everyone else. And noone in corporates will use mutt. Hell why do that, its 2013 for crying out loud

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