On Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:30:11 -0400, Fuzzy Logic <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Right. My point is that most people reading the thread will have
> already read the previous messages. So, top-posting only slows down
> the people who haven't, which taking less time for those who have.
Untrue. Of the messages I've read on this list today 7 were new, 19
were replies to the message I'd just read, and 19 were replies to a
message I hadn't just read. In many cases the last group were replies
to messages I read over 24 hours ago, so there's no way I'd remember
what they were about.
That means that in the case of half the replies I read I couldn't know
the context without a quote to tell me. And it's worse than that,
because in the case of the other half I need the context to tell me
it's a reply to the message I've just read. Of course I could keep
jumping back and forth between the message text and the message list,
but that slows me down.
And this is on a comparatively serial mailing list. On others the
proportion of immediate replies is around 20%.
Think about your post here. It was the first post I read in this
mailing list today, and the last time I was here was around 30 hours
ago. If you'd top-posted, what I would have seen would be:
Irrelevant. I have no trouble following the messages. My objection
is to having them there in the first place. As you note, this is a
preference, not an inhibiting factor
How am I supposed to know what is irrelevant? By your reasoning, I
should remember because I've read the rest of the thread, but that was
over a day ago and it was just one of dozens of threads. And I bet if
I'd started this post with just "Untrue" you wouldn't have had a clue
what was untrue, considering that you wrote it yesterday.
Interleaved ("bottom") posting didn't come from nowhere. It came about
because experience showed that it was the most effective means of
communicating in an environment where many different conversations
were happening at once and where many of the participants were reading
or contributing at intervals of hours or days and couldn't remember
every conversation.
But then something very interesting happened. On to the scene came
loads of newcomers who didn't know anything about styles of posting
and didn't want to find out, but simply typed wherever the cursor was
placed when they replied to a message. And it's a funny thing about
humans, but they really hate to do something a particular way and then
find out that there's a better way. And they start insisting that the
way they've been doing it is the better way, even when the opposite is
demonstrably true.
It reminds me of people who insist that using a mouse is always faster
than using a keyboard, or people who insist that using a keyboard is
faster than a mouse. Experiment shows that different tasks are faster
with different techniques, but there are people who are adamant that
they do everything faster one way even though they don't. People hate
to admit error, even if that means building a fantasy world in which
what they want to believe is true. You insist that reading top-posted
messages is faster, but I bet a clock would disagree.
--
Matthew Winn
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