The sorrows of top-posting despite oneself
David Heinemeier at Signal vs. Noise posts an extended apology 
about his ever-encroaching top-posting habits.
As Hawk Wings readers know, I am a top-poster—proud, unrepentant, barbaric—so I read with interest his struggle between tradition (bottom-posting) and what comes naturally in many email clients (top-posting). Perhaps you will too.
Also interesting was the suggestion in the comments that “the stigma of top posting seems to be an artifact of newsgroups”.
Usenet continues to torture people with “posting guilt” long after its dominance on the Internet has faded.
Tags: bottom-posting, email, guilt, top-posting, tradition, usenetRelated posts
April 20th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Maybe bottom-posting became traditional? As I recall, interleaved-posting was the common “conversational” style back in ARPAnet mail days, at least with my correspondence.
April 20th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Hey there, old timer ;-)
I suppose that one should never lose sight of the fact that one person’s “tradition” is another person’s “current affairs”, depending on where your history starts.
Fair enough.
April 20th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Obviously, everyone is different but I will say that I personally do not like top posting. Part of the reason is that people tend to quote and include all of the past responses below their own response. Because of this tendency, I suspect that many (not all) people top quote due to laziness.
That said, I never go out and correct people I know on email quoting practices. In the end, I don’t think it is important enough to argue about, although I obviously enjoy talking about it with my fellow geeks online.
(By the way Tim, I love Hawkwings. I read it everyday.)
April 20th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Disclaimer: I bottom-post, and know why.
I don’t believe that correct-posting originates is an artifact of newsgroups. It’s an artifact of conversation; it’s laid out in the same way that a conversation works.
I am appalled every time I see someone justify behaviour (any behaviour, not just quoting) with “everyone does it” and/or “I’m too lazy to do it properly”. These are not good ways to live life.
The most interesting comment in the post says:
This is a strong reason not to top-post! I get replies like this all the time, and have to send another email asking the same questions.
Whereas I am not so egotistical to think that my time is more important than the person/people that will read my messages.
What I don’t understand is how it’s the top-posters that have got the jobs working on all the mail clients…
April 21st, 2006 at 1:39 am
It’s really interesting to see the passions aroused in that 37 Signals post.
I agree with Tony that justifying top-posting on the basis of laziness is, well, not much of a justification. That said, I’ve mentioned before that I’m an “inter-poster,” and part of the reason for that is ultimately to minimize effort–not just my own, but also the recipient’s.
I’ve discovered that if you craft a well-written and unambiguous e-mail that anticipates what the recipient might want to know, you can avoid multiple go-rounds with them and save trouble at both ends.
Another way that top-posting can be a false economy is this: if I receive an e-mail with five questions in it, I can break each one onto its own line and give a very brief response to each in turn. Doing so as a top-post would either involve more typing or would rely excessively on the recipient’s telepathic abilities to know what the hell I was responding to.
E-mail is already prone to ambiguity in many ways. To avoid it, my own e-mail style has evolved to the point of bluntness (Point of bluntness? I made a funny.) Formatting is another way to permit or avoid it (as David Heinemeier admits).
April 21st, 2006 at 2:32 am
I know why we bottom post — and I still top post. I am a modern user of email and chat services — I agree that bottom posting is easier flow of conversation, especially for reference. I am constantly mouthed off about this in admin groups — it’s the same arguement as asking me to stop cursing while I’m explaining Calculus. Sure, it doesn’t exactly fit, but stop listening to how I say it and listen to what I say:)
(flashes back to movie Magnolia’s: young boy is rapping about the murderer to the cop who keeps asking him to stop swearing and doesn’t listen to how the boy told him who’s the killer)
Atleast, that’s my flawed justification about why I top post — regardless, I like to read the most current new top down, not bottom up.
April 21st, 2006 at 2:34 am
Ah, a kindred spirit. I knew that there would be one somewhere! ;-)
April 21st, 2006 at 2:42 am
Well, I think everyone just has to do what they prefer. For example, if Tim sent me an email that was top quoted, I wouldn’t give him a hard time about it and would probably just respond in the same quoting method. But if I am the first to respond to an email, it will indeed be bottom quoted.
April 21st, 2006 at 2:48 am
That’s almost Joe Kissell’s very reasoned and liberal position.
And it’s quite right, of course. Jonathan Swift is spot on about that.
April 21st, 2006 at 9:40 am
Jonathan Swift, what? Slow on the uptake here …
April 21st, 2006 at 9:50 am
Sorry. See the literary appendix on Big-endians and Small-endians in an earlier post on top- and bottom-posting.
April 22nd, 2006 at 2:10 pm
In other words: “I think so highly of what I’m saying that I don’t need to pay attention to how I say it. You, miserable peons, must sift through what I say and put my meaning together, because I’m not willing to spend an extra couple of seconds composing my thoughts into a conversational style.â€
(That goes for either cursing during Calculus or top-posting.)
Myself: I believe, very strongly, that interwoven, conversational style is the One and Only True Way. I’m perfectly willing to forgive an ignorance of that style for quick one-offs, but when directly addressing questions, top-posting is just juvenile; even boorish.
April 22nd, 2006 at 6:50 pm
That particular remark from Brady rubbed me the wrong way, too, but I figured maybe he hadn’t clearly thought through its implications so it was worth giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Moving beyond personal preferences, I was reminded of a meta-perspective on the posting style debate which argues that mail systems are the underlying culprit. Excerpting from Calvin Spealman’s comment buried under others at Fighting the top reply:
The real problem here comes down to a core issue with the email system, that there is too much binding between the digital structure of the email and the visual presentation of that email.
My brief response to a related reply:
I certainly agree and even wrote up a few design ideas for it, geeze, around ten years ago. ['it' referring to the separation of the data layer from the presentation layer]
Surely enough mail system developers have realized this but for some reason nothing significant has been done about it (that I’m aware of anyway). Hmm.
April 23rd, 2006 at 1:39 am
Forgive me, I think my analogy was taken more literal than the intent. The point was to not hang on the ‘how it is said or written’; that this element is cosmetic and no where near as important as the theme of the discussion.
I was a political editor for many years, and while I think highly of my comments (and I hope you all do to), I do not think of anyone else as ‘miserable peons’ — so I’ll write that off as me taking your analogy more literal than the tongue in cheek intent it was meant to be?
But I’m going to take a cue from Dan here and note that since we’ve spent so much time talking about this, even actually calling other people who top post juvenile, even borish; does in fact make me feel as if I’m being stuck up, juvenile, and boorish for even subscribing to arguing this debate.
The point, again, is it’s cosmetic — to fight it so heavily ignore the root of the discussion; this arguement to me is not so much about how we write responses about email, but how we bicker about the presentation of conversation in writing vs reading the content — decipher or no.
April 23rd, 2006 at 1:52 am
My favorite quote from the 37Signals thread:
April 23rd, 2006 at 1:58 am
Sorry, Brady, the “miserable peons” bit was intended to take the whole thing over the top, to make it clear that my statement was an exaggerated caricature. I didn’t intend it as a personal attack.
April 23rd, 2006 at 2:39 am
(Sorry for three comments in a row. I was posting that quote from the 37S thread before I saw Brady’s last comment, and wanted to apologize for the offense before composing a reply to his points.)
[Brady said:]
I guess that right there is our fundamental disagreement. I don’t think that maintaining a conversational flow and tone is merely cosmetic. I tend to compose my thoughts before I speak, and I tend to trim and contextualize and quote my e-mails before I hit Send, and I think they are both matters of respect for the people I’m conversing with. It doesn’t always save me from being offensive (see above), but it helps.
[I said:]
To expand on my own point: I discuss the two extremes here: quick one-off replies (meaning, basically, things that won’t be archived for later reference), vs. directly addressing questions from a prior message. There’s a lot of grey area in between where I prefer the One True Way, but am really quite forgiving :-)
April 23rd, 2006 at 1:33 pm
No need to apologize Dan, nothing you said I took offense too or in the wrong — my apologies if MINE came off defensive:) I love a strong, open conversation; it’s good for the head and good for the soul.
I can see your point on structure — and I’ll agree that I do this as well with exception to extreme, overly busy situations where I find myself responding to ichats in a tasteless furry. My view is that it holds less weight than the discussion at hand is all, but I can see both ends:)
April 25th, 2006 at 10:54 am
On “cosmetic” (ir)relevance in meat-space conversation:
Someone’s bad breath, body odor and appearance can be uncomfortably distracting even when they have something important to say.
Or, someone’s pleasant fragrance and appearance may be comfortably distracting when what they’re saying is a load of crap.
When someone wants to influence my initial impression of the worthiness of engaging in conversation, the latter usually gets more immediate attention than the former. But the more “interesting” conversation will eventually win my attention if we both stick around long enough with enough patience.
Hmm.
April 25th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Use em’s over i’s in your code — i is presentational, em has accessibility focus:)
I’m failing to see how your physical analogy fits fully in a virtual discussion — I understand where you’re leaning towards here, but don’t really see how you can strongly compare someone’s odor to the quality of their conversation.
April 26th, 2006 at 9:03 am
I don’t understand what you mean.
The point of the analogy is how image/presentation may influence priorities and actions regardless of content quality.
In online communication, shoddy-looking mail messages (web sites, whatever) may bias someone towards skipping or delaying them in favor of ones that are more visually appealing even if the former has superior content. Specific example:
You’ve got dozens of unread messages from different friends in some inbox, one being a rather illegible broken-quoted text with a “please read and respond!” subject. How motivated will you be to dredge the supposedly-valued content out from its broken context before handling other messages that require less time and effort to process?
For me anyway, if message or site formatting/style impedes my ability to quickly “grok” enough content to deem value then whatever it is usually gets bumped to a lower processing priority. If someone leaves an impression of not putting effort into or caring about what they intend to convey then it doesn’t inspire effort or caring on my part. Of course, there are different levels of formality and context to consider.
Anyhoo. I’d hoped there’d be interest in the subtopic of separating data and presentation layers but ended up in this subtopic alley instead.