Re: Disc Brake v.s. Rim Brake

SocSecTrainWreck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
Tim McNamara wrote:
>>
Tosspot wrote:
>>>
Michael Press wrote:
>>>>
Do not top post. Ever hear of bicycle maintenance? Stick around
and learn something; as you have nothing to teach me.
>>
Christ, the Usenet Nazis are alive and well in this little neck
of the interweb.
>
The invocation of Godwin's law came up early in this thread. Congratulations. As far as participating in Usenet goes, however, Michael's advice is correct. Don't top post, it's like pissing in
the swimming pool. Most everyone else has learned that simple
thing.

The strange thing is that top posting is actually the norm in the
real world, usenet is the exception. If someone were to bottom post
in a business world email chain you would be thought of as odd
bordering on crazy, if anyone actually saw your response. As long as
someone is going to quote the entire previous history of a thread in
their response, top posting makes more sense because at least you
don't have to scroll down through the entire thread to get to the
point. Bottom posting only makes sense if you are editing the history
to clarify what it is that you are responding to. It's interesting
how people have become so caught up in the rule "don't top post" that
they have lost sight of its purpose and now blindly follow it, adding
a couple of lines of commentary at the bottom of dozens of lines of
history.

E-mail is not Usenet. The convention on Usenet is what it is because it is a public discussion. This convention was developed through trial and error. It is appropriate and necessary to educate newbies and intransigent non-newbies as to why top posting is inappropriate in this type of discussion.

That said, I also reformat e-mails to be non-top posted because it makes more logical sense to the flow of the conversation using languages that read from top to bottom. Top posting is symptomatic of a mind insufficiently attentive to critical thinking, in my opinion. When I use Emacs/Gnus for my newsreader/mail client, the "deuglify" commands do this automagically. I also trim out the extraneous text which is not relevant.

That's been the standard for the entire history of e-mail and Usenet, developed through trial and error and the application of logic. That modern users are often lazy and lack critical analysis and reasoning skills is no reason to change best practices.
.

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