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 in e-mail?
Top-posting is, in short, the practice of putting the reply above the original message in electronic communication. Many of my friends top-post, and I believe most of them are a victim of Google’s otherwise close-to-splendid email application “Gmail”.
This is not a criticism you guys. It’s just a joke at your expense! 
For more information, guidance and general wisdom, you can read RFC 1855.
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MatGill | 15-Nov-08 at 3:13 am | Permalink
Doesn’t Gmail put them in order and hide the quotes? (Like you would like to see them). You’ve got to give them some credit for that.
yzt | 15-Nov-08 at 3:16 am | Permalink
Since when hiding stuff deserves credit?
And at best, they would deserve credit if their method worked in anything but the Gmail we interface.
But, I have to add that Gmail doesn’t force you to top-post. Bottom-posting is easy too (not quite as easy as the former though.) But inline reply is even harder.
MatGill | 15-Nov-08 at 6:22 am | Permalink
How could they possibly influence the world outside Gmail? Like making the algorithm open? Or what? providing service to other email providers to use their servers to thread emails?
Crediting people for hiding “stuff” has a long history. It started with Adam and Eve
yzt | 15-Nov-08 at 8:06 am | Permalink
That’s kinda my point. When they can’t change the world, why break accepted and logical protocols and netiquette?
MatGill | 15-Nov-08 at 8:55 am | Permalink
“When they can’t change the world, why break accepted and logical protocols and netiquette?”
I can think of these reasons, in no special order:
0. Because they can
1. Because they have these special ‘views’ about Internet and life: everything should be simple, fast and easy (and probably free, but you can never be sure about that). They will do what they think is better for the user (in the long run, once she gets over the stupid habits), and not what the user demands. You know (better than I do) that this is a basic principle in software design.
2. Because “It feels good to be the king”
3. Most importantly, people like Google’s threading mechanism. They’ve got good feedbacks and they are pushing it forward.
4. A new idea that breaks “logical protocols” is not necessarily illogical. It might just be another point of view or just another taste. Now can you tell my why writing from down to bottom is more “logical” than writing from bottom to top? (I mean what if we wrote everything from bottom to top, left to right). In fact in many poster designs the lines go from bottom to top, and guess what, I love it.
yzt | 15-Nov-08 at 6:41 pm | Permalink
0. OK. Hard to argue with that! It’s their application and they have a right to make it the way they want. And Gmail is really good already.
1. You sound like Microsoft zealots in 1995! (Me among them, I’m ashamed to say.) No corporation is completely benevolent. Their engineers might be full of cool ideas and their managers too, but a corporation is ultimately only concerned with profit margin.
I really didn’t expect you of all people to believe that someone else (and a corporation at that!) might know better that you yourself.
I do concede that Google has a much better attitude towards the community and the users (and even lusers) than Microsoft - for now.
2. So they must be on the cutting edge of innovation? Maybe. But I don’t like the kind of innovation that breaks everything, even if it’s not broken, just for the sake of innovation. And I don’t think that’s what Google does generally.
3. OK. Again, I have to agree with you. Note that I’m just agreeing to the fact that people do like this style (or at least they don’t care one way or the other and since this way is a tiny bit easier, they prefer this,) not that this style of replying to email is superior!
I’m just saying why not make it configurable? Like many other email clients; like Outlook, for crying out loud! I know it just takes some scrolling and a click for the user to write her response below the original message, but let’s face it, most of us don’t do that even if they cared.
4. Agreed. Taste matters. But please don’t compare a poster that needs to be aesthetically pleasing and innovative, one that you look at for 30 seconds, to 10s or hundreds of emails and posts per day you have to read and parse.
All in all, I see your point. The way it is is easy, straightforward and well handled, but why not make it configurable? That’s my quibble!
MatGill | 15-Nov-08 at 8:44 pm | Permalink
It’s _really_ difficult to design and code configurable web applications. I’ve had some experience with that. It’s much more difficult to do that on the web than to do it with desktop clients. Even moving boxes here and there needs tons of code and probably needs complex ajax libraries and likewise. In any case, you can still configure many things in Gmail. You can totally re-skin it with greasemonkey or you can use firefox addons that do that (Check out “Google Redesigned” for example) . Not everything has to put on the shoulders of the poor developers at Gmail
(In fact there is an active GM scrip repository maintained by Google: http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey. If you are geek-enough, you can further customize scripts for your own taste. There are tons of scripts to customize Gmail all over the web.)
By the way, have you checked out the script files and css files that come with Gmail? You’ll be amazed with the file sizes.
I totally disagree with you on the comparison of what I said and MS policies on software design. You miss a big point. I didn’t even mention the “freeness” of the software. I basically believe that you should not go with the flow. Every once in a while someone comes up with an idea that seems foolish at the time and then gains popularity. It’s looks like the natural selection, only with a mind behind the process. You need to have a market of free software to let things evolve like that. Those that have “better ideas” will evolve faster (more users, more contributers, etc). Those that look better at first or are conservative in the design will fail to compete with the evolving ones sooner or later.
“I don’t like the kind of innovation that breaks everything”
Take the Open Source model for instance. It looked like a stupid idea to “many” at first, and broke many “things”. None of those guys thought they were wrong at the time they opposed OS, but they were. But there were a community of developers who thought this is the right thing to do, and guess what, it was!
“I really didn’t expect you of all people to believe that someone else (and a corporation at that!) might know better that you yourself.”
I was not referring to myself or you for that matter. I’ve been using email clients for 6+ years now. I’m talking about the usual nagging people that come against any new idea because they think they know better what is good for them to do a job (excluding you ;)). But no, THEY DON’T. The public is too stupid to know in advance what is a good user interface and what’s not. Only the test of time can prove/disprove such things. So you put ideas to test (say beta test of Gmail) and then if you get good feedbacks you keep going with it. As long as there is a chance for the competitors to have their own market it will work fine. You see, I’m not trusting anybody! I’m trusting the open market. There is a huge difference.
yzt | 15-Nov-08 at 9:56 pm | Permalink
(There’s no good way for me to inline my answer, so I’ll be putting the burden of what is related to what on you.)
Are you saying it was too difficult for Google people to add another option (”Start my reply below the original message.”) to Gmail? Would it have represented a significant code size increase or performance drop or technical challenge for them? I am no stranger to web development. I know it’s not that difficult! Of course, the number of options they could have added in practically unbound, so it’s rather unreasonable to expect them to implement this particular one.
And I don’t use Gmail’s web interface and I don’t generally top-post, so Greasemonkey won’t help me (in this case.) Thanks to Google, I have IMAP access (I know you know that, just making a point!) The problem I mentioned in the original post is about the mail I receive. And while a significant number of top-posters are Gmail users, they are not even a majority. It’s clearly a user problem, and one thing experience has taught me is that these user problems (ones that affects other people, and not themselves) will never gets solved.
The reason I mentioned Gmail was that (I believe) it actually hides the original text so you don’t see where your reply is placed explicitly. But top-posting is unfortunately the default in all the mail clients I can recall (web-based or not.)
By the way, I didn’t directly compare Google with Microsoft. I compared your comment to those from Microsoft zealots in mid-90s to 2000. Of course, now that Microsoft is largely irrelevant, their remarks seems hilarious in retrospect.
Despite the fact that Google is way way better than Microsoft (technically, philosophically, politically and attitude-wise,) I’d rather have an irrelevant OS-Nazi (because nothing that matters requires Windows anyways, except games) than an octopus gripping the Internet, from which there’s almost no escape. Google has done largely the Right Thing up to now, but who’s to say what will happen in the future?
What I said about innovation seems to have riled you up pretty good! I meant “change for the sake of change” is not innovation. If it doesn’t work, if it does work but it can be done somehow better, sure! Change it. Break it down and remake it from another perspective. But just changing stuff for sake of non-conformity is rather juvenile in my opinion.
Not all new ideas that look stupid to many are in fact good and innovative ideas. Scientology, Windows Vista and Gangsta Rap all seem stupid because they are stupid ideas.
MatGill | 16-Nov-08 at 1:54 am | Permalink
Ok, you got me on Gagsta Rap
About the web interface, you are right. It’s easy to put that particular options, but they need to have enough people using it before they go for it (unless they prefer it themselves and want people to be that way). They can’t put tons of options, so they go for the “most wanted” list. Just recently they added the “right to left” button because many people requested it. Maybe if a group of people (you and, hmmm, the ones who wrote that standard) ask for it they add it to their list of options. But as long as you are a strict minority you need to work that out yourself with GM (I mean let all your friends have that GM script and use it when they want to email you, so practical).
Customization of web application, as I tend to define it, is to provide API for the UI layer to be changed easily. If you check out the Gmail GM site (linked above) you’ll see that they are providing easy API to GM. It basically means that you can pretty much write you own UI layer. But writing a general UI similar to the ones we have with client side applications (with the ability to change things with clicks, drag and drop, hold and drag, different views of lists, different sorting criteria, threading and likewise) is extremely difficult to implement with javascript code. It’s tedious work man, believe me. You can in principle write a whole web-based client-side-like email client. But everyone is waiting for yzt to start the project. I know he loves javascript.
Here is the deal about the threading idea. It’s not just a pure random mutation! There is a great mind behind the any major change you see on Gmail. They did not come up with the idea of threading emails and hiding quoted text just randomly for the sake of “changing it”. Some intelligent being (I know you don’t think such things could actually exist) came up with the idea, it went through tons of modifications and finally was put there for the user, only to get feedback and be refined. Although I don’t use it, but it seems a good idea to me. Now if it breaks the ideas we have about the philosophy of life, I personally won’t give a sh*t. It works and people like it. And those who don’t can go create their own Google with their conservative ideas and keep their own market (remember, there used to be something called Yahoo Mail, that went bankrupt for keeping on the same old ideas about huge stupid image ads and, even more annoying, the flash ads). I don’t think Google is Google because the name starts with a G or ends in an e. It is what it is exactly because it has been on the right side of the history (mostly). And if it starts to go on the wrong side it will get ripped like Y and MS did. Mark my words on that.
In any case, I seem to be much more liberal than you are. I like to see wild new radical actions that have never been tried before. Even if the old conservative crowd (you?
:D) think they are stupid.
yzt | 23-Nov-08 at 3:30 am | Permalink
Irrelevant to the last comment, here’s a story from Slashdot, about how the volume of the emails and records generated during Bush’s presidency has caused problems in archiving.
Apparently, there has been around 20TB of emails. How much of those you think is HTML garbage and useless quoting?
Top-posting hurts the planet! Read the comments in the post for other people’s views.
MatGill | 23-Nov-08 at 4:35 am | Permalink
Any good compression algorithm makes use of the repetition in the text and gets rid of that. If not, you can write you own compression algorithm specifically designed for emails.