Shooting yourself in the foot (or head):
One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war
First, there is no end to the debate on
Secondly, I should disclose that I am a top-poster.
Thirdly, the obvious pathos of the message notwithstanding, I have never seen a more perfect, self-contained demonstration of the failings of bottom-posting than the following, which appeared on a mailing list ten days ago:
When it gets past the “Bottom-posting is better”, “No, it isn’t!”, “Yes, it is!”, “No it isn’t!!” stage, bottom posters produce three arguments to defend their practice, arguments that are outlined after the jump.
In the years that I have been following this debate and in which my own habits were formed, bottom-posters have relied on three arguments, two spoken and one unspoken.
- People have bottom-posted from the beginning. It’s tradition. It’s the badge of my geekdom, the sign of my tribe.
- Bottom-posting follows more naturally the conventions of a conversation or narrative. You get a more natural flow by bottom-posting.
- (Unspoken). Microsoft’s email clients encourage top-posting. Only by bottom-posting can we resist the ever-encroaching darkness.
Only the second argument has enough substance to warrant a reply.
I think that it has its origins in the early years of the Internet, when email was a new thing. “What’s an
I don’t find this argument convincing in theory or practice.
In fact, the metaphor of email as letter or transcript sucks.
Internet communication is more like a notice-board or the bits of paper on the front of your fridge. The most recent, currently-important stuff is on the top. Blogs understand this. They top-post. Some discussion boards and forums understand this. News sites understand this. They have a better metaphor; they all top-post.
In practice the situation is just as bad. Bottom-posting means scrolling down past inches of text that you already remember or don’t need to know, in order to read the poster’s contribution. The Mighty Mouse gets a good work-out, but it’s a bad result for efficiency or sensible communication. Imagine burrowing down to the bottom of the pile of notes on your fridge to find the newest. Who would put up with that?
What’s more, it leads people to top post that there is a bottom post.
All talk of
It’s polite. It’s respectful of the reader’s time and intelligence.
It’s just better.
Being a reasonable, open-minded person, known to swing both ways, I am open to being persuaded by other arguments for bottom-posting that I may have missed or misunderstood.
Literary Appendix (Satirical)
It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs before we eat them, was upon the larger end: but his present Majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.
The people so highly resented this law, that our Histories tell us there have been six rebellions raised on that account, wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown…
… It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volums have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.
During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Brundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text: for their words are these; That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.
Similar Posts:
- The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
- Gruber’s bottom-posting scripts for Mail.app
- An ode to bottom-posting
- Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here
- Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting
Tags: bottom-posting, email, Jonathan Swift, metaphor, top-posting
October 4th, 2005 at 1:36 am
Top-posting is difficult to follow. It puts everything out of order, and leaves a big mess at the bottom that is useless; you might as well just not include the quoted text at all, for all the good it does down there.
Having said that, adding a reply at the bottom without first trimming the quoted text down to the bare minimum necessary for context is almost (but not quite) as bad as top-posting. Including the previous message quoted in its entirety is just silly and unnecessary.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:28 am
Until about a year or two ago, I was pretty strict about bottom-posting, for probably the first two of the three cited reasons. I’ve mostly changed over to top-posting, though. Why? In the 15 years I’ve been using e-mail, the types of individuals who send and receive e-mail has changed dramatically. Whereas in 1990 you could usually assume that most correspondants would bother to trim down the quoted text to the bare minimum necessary _and_ intersperse their comments appropriately amongst the quoted text, we have long since been in a time where a lot of users don’t even bother to trim out several million “From” messages when forwarding odious chain letters.
In addition, a lot of mailers seem to not know how to insert quoted text appropriately, so I have a few people who intersperse their replies among the original text in all capitals. Or, even worse, the clowns who seem to think HTML-encoded e-mail is a pretty neat idea, and use all sorts of annoying “stationery” and horribly ugly type.
Ergo, if I want my e-mail to be read, I’m better off top-posting and letting it stand away from the stuff underneath. If I need to reply directly to quoted text, I’ll intersperse comments and then continue, but face it: the Internet has changed, and the average e-mail user doesn’t understand (or care) about why it’s important to maintain standards of readability and flow. Many are far more concerned about forwarding ancient chain letters for the 800th time to everyone in their entire address book.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:43 am
Bottom poster here, and I feel strongly about it — but you must, must — must! — trim & contextualize the text you’re quoting. In your example, only two or three lines should have been quoted, along with the link and their reply.
I see where Dipesh Navsaria above is coming from, but I still think we can rage, rage against the dying of the bottom post. And the trimming of From: headers. Educate the users!
October 7th, 2005 at 7:27 am
[...] But what caught my eye was a post made by Timothy Gaden, which you can read here. Timothy, in his way, defends top-posting and throws some of his ideas about why is better. I don’t need to tell you that I completely disagree with Timothy. The only way to give you my -rather unimportant- point of view is to quote part of what he wrote: [...]
December 13th, 2005 at 11:04 am
[...] I think that bottom-posting is a silly convention that has passed its use-by date. [...]
December 13th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
[...] So Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings (a pretty decent, and pretty oft updated Apple Mail.app tips site) – went and posted an epistle on the value of “top-posting” – the practice of responding to an email above the previous sender’s message. As this (the “top posting”, not the epistle) encroaches on what many consider good taste, and might even violate an RFC – you might expect he got some responses, even an ode to bottom posting. [...]
December 13th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
[...] HawkWings later says: [...]
December 31st, 2005 at 2:57 am
[...] Of course, there were less successful moments too. I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else. [...]
January 26th, 2006 at 12:30 am
[...] I think it has something to do with AppleScript. (Or possibly Jonathan Swift). Technorati Tags: endianness, Wikipedia, AppleScript [...]
February 9th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
An interesting discussion. I found it as a result of someone I know having a problem with replies received in which the quoted text was seriously out of order.
Example: the reply to the original was at the top, the original message was second, the second reply was next and the first response to the first reply was below that.
I hope that was clear enough to paint a picture of the problem.
It seems to me that one or the other standard should be agreed upon so that this doesn’t happen to users. Perhaps a new convention is in order. A hidden date belonging to the original and all replies should be included so that quoted text can be sorted according to the recipients wishes.
Ah, the joys of computing.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:31 am
I am an “inter-poster”. When responding to a message, I try to address each of the writer’s points directly after them, interleaving my message with the quoted message. I think this is what Dan Ridley is getting at. I also try to structure the e-mail I send to encourage inter-posting, by organizing my points into lists on separate lines.
Top-posting is fine if you’ve got one thing to say. Otherwise, I think it is both more work to put your remarks in context, and more prone to misunderstanding.
March 31st, 2006 at 7:03 am
Ah, another moderate like Joe Kissell. Where’s the fun in that? ;-)
“Inter-posting” sounds very sensible to me, esp. if everyone were as sensible as you about structuring their initial message.
April 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 am
Gee, will I qualify as another moderate, too?
How I structure e-mail replies depends on the type of communication and who the recipient(s) will be. Normally I use (and prefer) selective quoting with my responses since that “you said”, “I say”, “you said”, … inter-posting style has a naturally conversational-like flow. Sometimes I’ll trim most of the original quoted text and bottom-post to its specific point and maybe add some unrelated comments. Occasionally I’ll top-post in “business-like” replies for the sake of preserving prior correspondence.
Pure top/bottom-posting often seems sender-centric to me, notably on busy mailing lists after dozens of replies have stacked up. And switching quoting styles mid-thread makes things even messier. Anyone else been frustrated trying to sanely follow those types of convoluted-quote-bloated replies with Gmail conversation threads? I quickly abandoned any hope of read a couple Yahoo! Group lists with Gmail because of the inability to quickly determine who’s replying to what when, worsened by the YG tagline propagation. Hiding/expanding quoted text is ineffective for me in that context. And Apple Mail’s drain-bamaged message threading hardly makes it any easier.
. . .
My brother is a compulsive top-poster, and I never miss a chance to pester him about it. There’s something annoying and distracting with seeing my original message “lazily” appended to the bottom of every reply. With enough begging he sometimes omits it, then quickly reverts to his preferred top-posting style if I don’t
nagremind him about how much I hate it.. . .
Adam wrote:
I agree it’s more work on the sender’s part putting remarks in context but don’t see how that would be more prone to misunderstanding by recipients (assuming proper formatting on their end).
April 20th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
I have always been a bit of a switch hitter. I mostly post to the top but on occasion the content seems better served from the bottom.
I really did know this top or bottom was even an issue; And I have email since about 1994. But just lately a list nanny sent me a couple of note asking me to bottom post. I found this very odd as I have been on this list for at least six years. But I find it nothing to fight over. I now post that list at the bottom; when I can remember to do so.
April 20th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
@Roger – Would you be able to send me a copy of those emails about bottom-posting, just for interest’s sake?
December 18th, 2006 at 5:45 am
hello
im trying to fix a problem which is, whenever i click internet explorer two pages open at once..one is ok but another is a blank page with microsoft internet explorer written at the top and it keeps pushing to the front all the time.. im running internet explorer 7 with xp sp2..any ideas would be very much appreciated..thankyou
December 31st, 2006 at 10:05 am
Happy new year !-!
o:)))))
January 24th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
http://sweet-erotic.net
March 6th, 2007 at 8:25 am
You answered your own arguement well. Despite being an avowed top poster, you placed the reply at the bottom as it should be.
Thank you for your informative post.
July 19th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Maybe Mail.app should continue to “top post” when one is quoting the entire text of the replied to message, but “bottom post” when you selectively quote (when you highlight text to be the only quoted text in a reply). Where it would be more effective
I never even knew “top posting / bottom posting” was much of a hot topic with anyone until just this week. Strange.
In getting to your blog comparison. Yes, the front page being top posted is the logical way to run a blog. But I think that top posting in archive pages makes no sense.
When I go to a blog that I’ve discovered, and want to go back and read from the beginning of that blog. It’s annoying to have to go to the bottom and read each post moving up. Especially with blogs that have longer posts. You are constantly scrolling down, then up, down, up, etc.
Sadly most blogging systems don’t seem to have any way to reverse this. (I think you can jury rig Movable Type, but that’s about it.)
March 15th, 2010 at 9:48 am
You know what I’ve never really taken much thought to this but I have to say I am somewhat in both camps.
Because e-mail readers put the reply at the top of the previous e-mail it is often more of a pandering to the incompetent to top post.
That being said though bottom posting makes far more sense.
Forums, Facebook, chat apps, ALL bottom post but the idea about blogs top posting is wrong as well because while the newest content is at the top the actual communication in the post (i.e. the comments) are bottom posting because it makes more sense to scroll down than up because everything starts at the top and works its way down.
May 11th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Technically, shouldn’t you put all of these comments above the blog entry if you feel the replies should come first as in top-posting? You should begin with the most recent comment, then the older comments, and then finally the blog post in which they are all in reply to…
I mean, really, this seems to violate the whole ‘top posting’ thing by having the most recent comments on the blog post at the very end of the page! ;)