[HN Gopher] Why top posting has won (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Why top posting has won (2018)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 59 points
Date : 2025-05-25 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.solipsys.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.solipsys.co.uk)
| throwanem wrote:
| Imagine mistaking courtesy for procrastination. But to see this
| writer focus obsessively on the inessential is hardly novel. What
| in any case may one expect of someone who doesn't even bother
| introducing his topic until two-thirds of the way through the
| piece? Even in my forties I barely remember there was ever an
| argument about this. Are there still enough crusties left alive
| who care to sustain the discussion?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's just the default behavior when clicking the reply button.
| The reason why people don't top post on Discord or any other
| messaging software is because it doesn't do it by default.
| card_zero wrote:
| It wasn't always. I was raised to reply at the bottom, in
| Eudora. Then Outlook changed everybody to replying at the top
| in order to be obnoxiously modern or something, in the late 90s
| I think.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The reason why people don't top post on Discord is the same
| reason our terminal apps scroll older lines upward. That's the
| convention for active scrolling text.
|
| E-mail readers have people switching from document to document
| and starting anew with each. When viewing documents we start at
| the top, and the reply is the most prescient thing to see.
| richard_mcp wrote:
| I find it to be the exact opposite. Replying in-line is great
| when it's a short email between a two people. But if the email is
| to a wide audience, has multiple back and forths, or new people
| get CC-ed later, in-line posting is much more difficult to
| follow. It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out
| who said what while also keeping state of all the different
| threads.
|
| Top posting takes more effort to do well, but makes it much
| easier to follow an email chain.
| layer8 wrote:
| The point of inline replies is to quote just enough to
| establish the context of the reply, and to enable replying to
| multiple separate points without having to separately establish
| each point as context. Case in point:
|
| > It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out who
| said what
|
| Email clients used to color each quoting level, and mails
| started with something like: John Doe wrote
| on $date: > Jane Smith wrote on $date: > > Joe
| Shmoe wrote on $date: > > > what they wrote
| > > what they wrote > what they wrote
|
| and you knew that Jane was green and Joe was cyan. The
| respective points were also closer together, so you had to
| scroll less than you have nowadays.
|
| > while also keeping state of all the different threads.
|
| That's why we had threaded views that showed messages in a
| tree, and showed when the subject (line) changed. People were
| encouraged to edit the subject line to reflect topic drift, so
| that you had a good overview when looking at the thread
| visualization, which would omit repetitions of the same subject
| text and only show where it changed.
|
| Example (threaded view at top, colored quotes at bottom):
| https://robot.unipv.it/clipedia/images/mutt-threads.png
| linker3000 wrote:
| I didn't know there was a competition.
| junon wrote:
| It's been one of those "tabs vs spaces"-like holy wars for a
| while.
| sitkack wrote:
| (soft) No, no. Tabs vs spaces is more of a butter side
| up/down thing.
|
| Top Posting is how you assert dominance and gaslight an
| entire thread while ignoring a nuanced point of view. That
| complexity is not present in tabs vs spaces.
| jghn wrote:
| This was a huge debate on USENET in particular, as well as in
| the email world until Outlook effectively made top posting the
| standard.
|
| RFC 1855 [1] makes it clear that the correct way is to quote
| relevant text and then reply.
|
| [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| RFCs aren't really a suitable document for agreeing this sort
| of communication conventions.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky. I've always adapted to the prevailing
| format of each mailing list, but the people who try to create a
| holy war out of different styles have always been insufferable.
|
| In a normal office environment e-mail moves much faster, people
| open threads with the context already in mind, and expect to
| see the relevant new info at the top. Bottom posting would
| either make everyone sigh heavily when they see an e-mail from
| _that one person_ or would earn someone a quick coaching
| session to adopt the prevailing style of the office
| environment.
|
| But if you go on to a mailing list that wants bottom posting,
| that's what you do. It's a courtesy.
| almosthere wrote:
| Email was invented wrong, and there should not be top or bottom
| posting, but whatever. Instead the inventor should have made it
| so the previous content should have been in a special segment,
| and then the software could handle it from there.
| arp242 wrote:
| Okay!
|
| > the inventor
|
| Aside: email didn't really have "an inventor". Shiva Ayyadurai
| does not count.
|
| > should have made it so the previous content should have been
| in a special segment
|
| So how would you do this then, where you reply to a specific
| part?
| xp84 wrote:
| > how would you do this then, where you reply to a specific
| part?
|
| When specific context is needed, besides "the whole message"
| just do exactly as you and I are both doing right now. But in
| general, quoting the whole message is pointless unless you're
| adding a new recipient on, since we all have the threads in
| our email clients anyway. Whenever I can, I nuke the entire
| quoted part out of my replies.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Needs a (2018) added to the title -- the list of recent posts[1]
| gives the publication date as 2018-06-13.
|
| Incidentally: Bloggers, _please_ put dates in your actual blog
| post templates. The date is an important part of the context of
| any article.
|
| [EDIT: The author of the article has already added the date to
| their template. Thanks!]
|
| [1] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html
| 38 wrote:
| 100%. It's the most important piece of information. How anyone
| can forget to include it floors me
| altairprime wrote:
| You can email the mods to have them add that 2018 marking, so
| that it doesn't depend on them random-chance seeing your
| comment; the footer contact link has the address.
| kens wrote:
| I took the date out of my blog posts because I find the HN tic
| of putting the date in the title a little too precious.
| Obviously the date is important for some articles: the
| relevance of "Scientists make breakthrough in X" depends on the
| date. Otherwise it's just pointless enforcement of local
| custom, which by the way isn't in the submission guidelines.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I agree, all the hall monitoring in the comments about titles
| is cringe.
| harshitaneja wrote:
| Everyone should obviously be able to make decisions for their
| own content on their own websites/blog and more power to you
| for exercising your agency and choice here. I browsed through
| your blog and with your content on vintage computing and
| history, I can consume the content without having to care
| about a date.
|
| However, I don't find that to be the case for most of the
| written content I consume and knowing where some content was
| created temporally is important context more often than
| not(at least in my experience). Now, I can't nor would I want
| to dictate what others do on their own hosted content(where
| they generously share their hard meticulous work).
|
| Comments on HN and other places lamenting lack of dates
| however should be fair game to desire such additional
| context. But then again, you commenting back is just
| participating in the same dialogue so I guess my entire
| message has been just meandering.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I went looking for the date of this post because I honestly
| thought it was from the 1990s, when top-posting actually won.
|
| The date is more important than you're giving it credit for.
| Every creative work has a context and an implicit perspective
| that comes from that context. This is especially true for
| nonfiction articles, where the date tells you things like:
|
| * Whether the author is reacting to something that just
| happened or whether they have the benefit of historical
| hindsight.
|
| * Where the article fits in the author's overall body of work
| (including works they haven't written yet!).
|
| * What, if any, recent events may have prompted the author to
| write the article.
|
| * The prevailing intellectual climate, which carries focuses
| and blind spots that may be very different from what we have
| now.
|
| * Whether the article is about something immediately useful
| or whether it's more likely to be of historical interest.
|
| You can already tell, for instance, that "Thoughts on
| Software Development (1998)" is going to be talking about
| very different things than "Thoughts on Software Development
| (2012)" or "Thoughts on Software Development (2025)". An
| article like "Better C Programming (2020)" probably contains
| some useful advice; whereas "Better C Programming (1991)"
| should be taken with a large grain of salt.
|
| Instead of making readers ask questions like "Why is the
| person talking about operating system monopolies while saying
| nothing about LLM model ownership?", it's easier and more
| helpful to just put the date at the top.
| akkartik wrote:
| I don't care about dates on titles in HN, but strongly care
| about dates _somewhere_ on any post online. Some indication
| of the time (range) when it was published. Even if the author
| doesn't consider it important it helps future readers
| (including the author! kinda like code comments!) answer all
| sorts of unanticipated questions about the post down the
| road. And it's easy to do. I do it all the time by reflex in
| my private longhand notebooks. So if you also consider this
| precious, I don't understand what you mean by "precious" and
| I have trouble translating it to some concrete ill-
| consequence that would preclude doing this very easy thing
| that might help one's readers.
| gumbojuice wrote:
| I feel like blog posts auto -adjust posts to some recent date
| for seo optimization, so most dates on blog posts are useless.
| bravoetch wrote:
| And the more date-specific 'best thing 2025' articles also
| update titles to match current year. Email is already a
| wasteland of notifications and things I haven't unsubscribed
| to after buying something. Web is now a wasteland of SEO
| optimized content. I'm bummed it's gone this way. Looking
| forward to AI becoming monetized in a similar way by
| inserting product placement etc.
| quesera wrote:
| I once worked at a place where the marketing team
| _explicitly_ removed dates from corporate blog posts for SEO
| purposes.
|
| The idea was that some content is, or benefits from being
| perceived as, "evergreen". Always relevant.
|
| Maybe -- but it's still deceptive, I think.
|
| On the other hand, even here on HN we see people talking
| about "unmaintained" GitHub repos where the last commit was
| more than a few months ago. So, recency-bias is a real thing,
| and marketers certainly don't want to be penalized for
| honesty. :)
|
| This was a while ago. Nowadays, the obvious opposite extreme
| is common. Blogspam that is "updated" with a current date,
| but no changes to content.
| 38 wrote:
| Jesus what a terrible blog. The post is not dated at all, which
| in my opinion is the single most important piece of information.
| Also no mobile layout, so I have to manually scroll like a
| typewriter to read each line. What decade are we in?
| jjcob wrote:
| That article would be just as relevant if it was posted in
| 1995, 2005, 2015, or 2025. This is a never ending debate and I
| don't see how adding a date would make it better.
| 38 wrote:
| I agree of course, it will be relevant forever, no point in
| adding a date
| akkartik wrote:
| Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete
| dichotomy. I often encounter threads on mailing lists where
| people are replying inline but not trimming the part they're not
| replying to. That makes it hard to follow. Or they reply inline
| and trim well but it's still hard to follow because you need more
| context than just the part they're replying to.
|
| So the key is "the thread needs to be distilled" as OP puts it.
| And often that's more work than just finding the right sentence
| to quote.
|
| My approach these days in my email is:
|
| 99% of the time I quote nothing and delete everything my client
| puts into the compose window, relying on the default thread-view
| in most email clients to supply the context for my readers.
|
| 1% of the time I need to quote, and I quote liberally, treating
| words as a wiki, and editing/sculpting the text in '> ' just as
| much as my own reply below it.
| addaon wrote:
| I agree.
|
| > Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete
| dichotomy.
|
| There are just so many options.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| Yeah this is my strategy. The top/bottom post brigade are both
| happy and email clients seem to handle it well.
|
| It's kind of alarming to me that the default in say gmail is to
| constantly re-send the original message chain back and forth. I
| guess it then gives the whole chain to newcomers to the thread?
| aniou wrote:
| It won because it was in place (Outlook) and almost nobody cares.
|
| Official version is: "because there is a whole history of
| correspondence and it is convenient to forward it to new
| participants".
|
| In reality? It doesn't matter. Almost no-one reads, neither top-
| or bottom-posted mails. But there is a drawback in top-posting
| and I mean a "my comments inside original post, in
| color/bold/with indent/randomly inserted between two phrases".
| There is no standard of citing in top-posting - thus sometimes
| original mail gone. Edited, re-edited and commented in various,
| inconsistent and often unreadable ways.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Many people moved from Outlook to GMail.
|
| Unfortunately, GMail doesn't do it any better.
| fmbb wrote:
| Gmail makes it easier for top posters because it shows you the
| email threads.
|
| Outlook did not use to make it easy to follow threads at all.
| leephillips wrote:
| Except that Gmail fails to display threads correctly, as
| shown in detail here:
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If the mail reader does a good job organizing the thread, you
| don't need to quote the original at all in many cases,
| because the recipient can easily see the message that's being
| replied to.
|
| I wonder what the carbon footprint is for poorly threaded
| email clients that encourage including the entire thread in
| every reply.
| arp242 wrote:
| I think this hugely overthinks things and it's actually a lot
| simpler: Outlook and other Microsoft tools didn't support bottom-
| posting. It was only kind-of possible if you changed several
| settings and even then you had to manually change stuff in every
| reply. That by far the most important reason top-posting "won".
|
| I use past tense because I haven't used any of this Microsoft
| stuff for over 10 years, but I assume this is still the case.
|
| This sort of moves the question to "why did Outlook only support
| top-posting?" I don't have a clear answer to that, but if I look
| at the general state of Microsoft and email at the time then it's
| probably a combination of the Not-Invented-Here (and maybe some
| "EEE") attitude at Microsoft at the time combined with a general
| apathy and ignorance towards email.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes exactly. The first text-based email clients I used that
| quoted the original message in a reply[1] defaulted to bottom
| posting. They'd include the message with the ">" prefix on each
| line, and your cursor would be positioned at the bottom of
| that. So at that time most people did inline or bottom replies.
|
| Microsoft Email/Exchange/Outlook as best I can remember have
| always defaulted to quoting the message and leaving the cursor
| at the top. And they didn't prefix the quoted text in any way,
| so to do inline replies you'd have to make it clear which text
| was quoted and which text was new. People would use colors or
| different fonts when "rich" text became supported but it was
| more work and most people just took the easy path.
|
| [1] Very early on, MUAs did not (at least by default) quote the
| original message. This was because most people were using
| teletypes or slow (300 baud) terminals and possibly a line-
| oriented editor such as 'ed' so quoting the original message
| could add significant extra time needed to compose a reply.
| Also, with a mail client that does proper threading, you can
| see which message is being replied to and you don't really need
| to include that again in the reply.
| rixed wrote:
| There is no such thing as "supporting [top/bottom] posting".
| You have a text editor and a cursor, the real alternative is
| not "top" vs "bottom" but "I care about the context of the
| discussion" vs "I don't care". In the first case, you _edit_
| the quoted text and then answer inline, and in the second you
| just type your one line answer and hit "send".
|
| Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is incorrect. The initial cursor position and automatic
| email signature being at the top rather than at the bottom
| already makes a huge difference. Add to that the absence of
| tools to easily insert inline replies and cut down or
| reformat quoted parts, plus the absence of navigational
| behavior when reading mail that would jump to the first non-
| quoted part first, which earlier email clients used to have.
| arp242 wrote:
| Yes, when I had to use Outlook because of $dayjob I did
| bottom-post and it was absolutely an uphill battle. In the
| end I resorted to some custom VBScript code I wrote myself
| to make some aspects easier.
|
| In hindsight, all of that was a mistake because all my
| coworkers top-posted. Top-posting might be bad (IMHO), but
| a mixture of bottom and top is even worse.
|
| I now just top-post. I'm still not a fan but it is what it
| is.
| rixed wrote:
| Ah, let's not get started about "Why email signatures has
| won" :)
| layer8 wrote:
| Not sure what you mean, email signatures were standard
| well before Outlook. What changed is that the convention
| of beginning them with a line consisting of "-- " wasn't
| adopted by Outlook & friends, so automatic
| detection/hiding/non-quoting suffers.
| arp242 wrote:
| > Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
|
| In addition to what the sibling comment already points out,
| most people don't even _know_ what "top posting" or "bottom
| posting" is because they just do what the email client does
| by default (which in Outlook's case: strongly favours top
| posting).
|
| The only "lazy" thing here is this kind of smug judgemental
| attitude instead of looking for the actual reasons.
| champtar wrote:
| If you are using Microsoft Outlook mobile app or the webmail,
| inline or bottom posting experience is garbage, it doesn't
| quote/format the previous email, it just slaps it at the
| bottom. If you want to respond inline you better put some
| color else it's unreadable.
| pwg wrote:
| > I assume this is still the case.
|
| It is, $job's outlook install still "top posts" by default,
| just like always.
| beej71 wrote:
| I switched back to mutt after years of TB and, man, is it sooo
| easy to quote inline. I'd missed it. I'm sure a bunch of
| recipients are wondering wtf I'm doing. :)
| stock_toaster wrote:
| I'd say Gmail defaulting[1] to top posting, when it was
| publicly released in 2004, was definitely the nail in the
| coffin.
|
| [1]: Likely done for reasons of Outlook
| compatibility/familiarity.
| csallen wrote:
| I've always been fascinated by aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and
| those sorts of things. What is it that makes them so enduring, so
| satisfying, and so seemingly true? Why are we attracted to this
| form of expression moreso than longer and better-argued prose? Do
| things merely seem more true simply because they are wittily
| expressed, and if so, is that a good thing? (PG's recent essay
| had interesting things to say about this.)
|
| Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld:
|
| - "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something
| that does not displease us."
|
| - "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the
| fact that they can no longer set bad examples"
|
| - "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not
| admit they are wrong."
|
| - "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our
| fears."
|
| - "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."
|
| - "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we
| have no big ones."
|
| - "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we
| resort to to hide them."
|
| My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which
| prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more
| persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place,
| because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the
| conclusions of others.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Your last paragraph fascinates me because I think it's true.
|
| There's something about being told things directly that pushes
| people away, but a clever aphorism disarms us because it makes
| us feel smart for "getting it".
|
| There's something inside us that prefers indirect
| communication.
| erikerikson wrote:
| > There's something inside us that prefers indirect
| communication.
|
| This may come from culture or neurodiversity. Some of us
| greatly prefer explicit communication.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Sorry I forgot the standard caveats that generalizations
| don't apply to everyone.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Language is fundamentally an abstraction of some more complex
| thought. To then repeat the exercise, to take complex language
| and distill it again to a simple abstraction in a few words, is
| probably deeply satisfying to our monkey brain.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| The section on proverbs is missing the point, despite
| overthinking it.
|
| You're not meant to take a proverb and apply it literally in all
| cases. It's a piece of wisdom you pull out when you deem it
| appropriate. The analysis and individual judgement of the human
| being is implied.
|
| If you included more it wouldn't be a proverb.
| LastTrain wrote:
| I feel like most of the authors annoyances and misunderstandings
| could be fixed with a bit of advice from my dad- "use your
| goddamn head". Yes, a stitch in time doesn't save nine each and
| every time.
| jagraff wrote:
| I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to -
| email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple
| points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear
| medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads
| without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.
|
| I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded
| discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like
| git but for conversations?
| ColinWright wrote:
| I've written one, and people who use it, love it. People who
| look at it from the outside, hate it, hate on it, say hateful
| things about it, and generally make it clear that it should be
| set fire to, then buried.
|
| But I and colleagues use it regularly, and it absolutely hits
| the spot for non-linear discussions that are intended to find
| conclusions.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > email is not the right tool for long discussions with
| multiple points of disagreement
|
| It's still better than a teams call.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Almost anything is better than any Teams thing.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Why Top Posting Has Won (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 - April 2020 (140
| comments)
|
| _Why Top Posting Has Won_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302808 - June 2018 (3
| comments)
| trueismywork wrote:
| The biggest advantage of top posting is that you can involve new
| people in middle of a thread and they have all the context
| without working harder.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I don't disagree that top posting is often the result of
| laziness, but I think the logical thread of the articles starts
| to break down at this point:
|
| > _But when the thread is long, and when your reply is to a point
| deeper inside, suddenly the receiver has to do a lot of work.
| You, the sender, have saved yourself time, but the receiver has
| to do more work than you have saved. Potentially a lot more
| work._
|
| The problem is that readers are also lazy, and increasingly
| people don't have time to follow long threads at all. With inline
| responses, it's far too easy for threads to branch off in a
| million directions. Once that happens you'll often lose the
| forest for the trees. It's reasonable for usenet-style internet
| discussions where participation is voluntary and asynchronous by
| definition, but in work collaboration it's a strong anti-pattern.
| In a situation where there is a goal and desired outcome, top-
| posting is a reasonable way to keep a thread linear and outcome-
| focused. It can still break down for complex or controversial
| issues, but in that case email is the wrong medium, instead jump
| on a call or write a proposal.
| thom wrote:
| If you're feeling particularly nostalgic, you can just have an
| LLM take all your incoming email and tell it to rewrite it so
| it's no longer top-posted.
| neilv wrote:
| One of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see
| mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the
| history of the email thread up to that point, but it's missing
| emails (because of concurrency with possibly multiple replies
| going on at once, and because of cherry-picking or randomly-
| picking which subtree to respond to).
|
| Even in a back-and-forth between 2 people, there are some people
| who'll reply a second time to the same email, not to replace
| their earlier response, but to add more information.
|
| (Aside: Also, it seems to be rare for people forwarded a top-
| posted thread context to actually read it, unless they're looking
| to assign blame.)
|
| In every company, I end up having to reconstruct context for
| someone, or do archaeology on some interaction, and the top-
| quoting both helps and hurts.
|
| Downsides of lazy top-posting for these purposes include having
| to break out all those messages, and fill in the gaps from maybe
| multiple copies at different points.
|
| Upsides include when, say, a single email is the only record, and
| the fact that a bunch of people top-posted means you have more
| raw information, in the quotes, than if that single email was in
| a history of people doing proper Netiquette with minimal quoting
| of the parts they were responding to.
|
| There are a whole bunch of reasons and implications for how
| things are done in corporate practice, and IME most of them come
| down to one of: poor tools, poor use of the tools (including by
| "digital natives"), and corporate misalignment + politics.
| thechao wrote:
| One thing I like about Slack-like message systems is that they
| naturally bottom post. However, they tend to go "asynchronous",
| which makes conversiarcheology nearly impossible. I don't
| understand why I can't click the message I want to reply to and
| have my response inserted at that point. (With an obvious: it's
| been too long to do that limiter.) The messages can stay
| inline, but having the user mark the dependency (even
| retroactively) could lead to some real tooling & conversation
| recovery improvements. I dunno; Slack has some sort of Canvas
| integration which I need like a new hole on my head.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| People already struggle to use threads in Slack correctly,
| adding arbitrary nesting of messages doesn't feel like it'd
| be an improvement.
| thechao wrote:
| Not nesting: the ability (for a little while) to tell slack
| to locally reorder the conversation. This tends to happen
| with three users all trying to talk to each other: the
| communication is still dual, so you end up with "yeahs" and
| crud like that "out of place". The emoji solve this to a
| large extent; but, neither well nor articulately.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| I surrendered a long time ago and started top-posting like normal
| people do, but a few times I wrote to someone and they replied
| the old way with just quotes and bottom-posting, and then I
| immediately revert to that mode myself.
|
| I wish there was some good way to silently communicate that
| preference to likeminded. Then I would know right away when to
| switch to proper netiquette without the other person having to go
| first. And how often was I in an email exchange with someone else
| that also prefer to not top-post, but both did that anyway since
| that is just the expectation now?
| tbrownaw wrote:
| <span style="color: darkred; font-weight: bold">comments added
| below</span>
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I have similar feelings about voice messages over chat apps. I
| pretty nearly always read it as "my time is more valuable than
| yours" especially if it's long. Listening on 2x speed is not as
| good as skim reading. It should go without saying that I make an
| exception for people with disabilities.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If you use a competent email software like Gmail, this is a non-
| issue.
| tzs wrote:
| I remember this amusing argument against top posting that I saw
| on Usenet at least 20 years ago: A: Because it
| messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q:
| Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting.
| Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
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