Mayo 03, 2006
email peeve
dammit i hate top-posting!!! i was gonna say top-posters, but that's hatin' the player, not the game. I'd hate most of internet-using humanity if i said that.
but you know why everyone does it? cuz of the fricking tools. pinche email clients all put the cursor ABOVE the text you're replying to. so no wonder everyone is a top-poster. but it's so annoying!!! it makes so much more sense to reply to something AFTER you quote what the other person said. like you read on a piece of paper, or a bathroom wall.
argh.
(stay tuned someday for the next peevish blog entry: Open Letter to All Motorists. I've been writing it in my head every day for the last 3 months, if not 6 years.)
Posted by steev at Mayo 3, 2006 04:55 PM
OK, I'll be el Abogado de Diablo
Isn't this blog top posted? Even if an entry follows on a previous thought, it appears at the top. I believe there is a valid argument for the traditional reverse chronological posting. With the most temporially relevant item first, if the recipient (or lurker) doesn't recall the train they can refer down (as to a footnote) to find it out.
Wouldn't an inter-posted (non-top posted) email interchange become harder and harder to read as the individual paragraphs and sentences were bifurcated into mimetic "strange attractors" by the fractal reiteration of semantic points.
True the message would be a holographic piece of writing, in which each fragment would contain a part of the whole, as a opposed to a rigid reductionist sequence of micro texts, that don't represent the totality of the discussion, as one would find in a temporally dominated dialogue.
OK you've convinced me of the validity of non-top posting as new fractal literary form for the post-modern age, right up there with HyperText, but in the same way we still use Newtonian physics to play pool, I think there is still a place for the old way of posting as well.
(still procrastinating!) yeah i hate this too. it is tied for my other very-related mail-quoting peeves: people who dont take out headers and worthless, unnecessary noise; and people who block quote the entire email (when long) and dont bother breaking it up into bits as they reply to each part.
like i wanna re-read 50 lines of unrelated junk that i probably already read in a prior email! even worse if it is from ME! just gimme a little context, say what you want, then repeat.
the blog-comment context is an interesting one. i would say its not analogous to email because the tools are much simpler (both cuz of technilogical limitation and user expectations). thats not to say you couldnt build an amazing threaded/quoting discussion tool (tho i have never seen one -- and am on the lookout for sito, which desparately needs improvement). however, this doesnt excuse the email problem in my eyes -- cuz the tools allow it and its not *that* much more complicated. (i mean, would a user not be able to figure out micrsoft word for putting a paragraph above or between others?)
I'm guilty of top-posting, mostly with work-related emails. For me, it makes more sense. "Here's the stuff that matters" (my top-posted stuff) and "here's the context, if you care to read it, but you probably don't, because you typed it". With all the weird ways that email clients handle quoted material, this seems like the most streamlined and readable way for me.
But I still trim "old" thread stuff, cut things that are no longer relevant, if it makes the email more readable.
My rule-of-thumb is to, when possible, make my reply almost independent of the quoted material... so you don't have to read your own message to figure out what I'm referring to. This takes the form of sub-headers and paraphrasings.