Is the topic still contested? In business email, top posting seems to have completely won. Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?
[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TopPostingReal...
Plenty of people continue to comment inline. I wouldn't have quoted your comment except it's a humorous way to make this point :-)
It may be the kinds of people I hang out with, but I have observed:
1. Business people top post; they seem to want the top post reply to be short enough to read on the phone without scrolling and want the subject line to provide enough context so AFICT they never look the the quoted message.
2. Mailing lists I'm on have a mix of top post replies and inline replies; I've learned that the top-post responders can by and large be ignored.
3. People born after around 1998 tend not to reply to mail at all. I forced my born-in-98 kid to learn to write a good email (and boy was it a struggle) but when he was looking for a job he told me it was a superpower because the folks he was competing with couldn't/wouldn't do it.
I started top posting and keeping the complete history because people were requesting it. They want to be able to quickly get the information at the top, but have the context below if they need it.
> People born after around 1998 tend not to reply to mail at all.
I've been running into this increasingly the past few years when conducting business. I don't understand how offices can function when lower-level people ignore a primary contact channel.
On Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:55 +1100 jameshart wrote:
> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking
> Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards
Yes.
—-
inopinatus(And keep in mind that the post is from 2009. For comparison, I switched to top posting in my personal email in 2013 [1] at which point it was controversial [2])
Have you ever heard of that site called HN?
Of course, technology adjacent mailing lists are almost always text based, and I don't know of any where top posting is the norm, so I reply inline to mailing list posts as well.
Yes, and one time it comes into play is when you're dealing with someone else who uses those conventions. IME, people still doing that are very sharp. And if they're doing it, you want to do it in kind, both because it can be more effective, and also to let them know you're clueful enough to know that style of email-fu.
But I also adapt to other people and organizations. For example, if some business person seems to keep the past history quoted, and also might be forwarding it within their bureaucracy to people who also expect that, then use that style. (And maybe also repair it to not drop history, such as when they respond to an old email, or they send two responses to the same people before anyone responds, or there's race conditions or oops/indifference when multiple people are responding. Not everyone has given any thought to how this works; they just start typing where their corporate-drone webmail or app left the cursor and quoted everything for them.)
When I have the luxury of setting an organization's conventions, I try to get people to capture all non-code institutional knowledge in a wiki and issue-tracker, and to not lean on ephemeral/silo'd email for the "history" of something, nor to create new silos in a dozen different SaaSes. (This also occasionally involves copy&paste of an email with important info into a wiki page, as the easiest way to leave some important info where whomever later needs it will see it.)
So it is a test to show if you are part of an ingroup or not. Just like any other etiquette... you know, you can tell the common folks from the upper crust by the way they use their fork! How you use your fork proved to be not a great predictor of sharpness in the end but it sure made life miserable for the upper crust. [1]
Frankly, from sharp people I expect to adapt to changing communication styles and utilize the one that facilitates communication the best. You seem to be doing that, so from my point of view you are sharper than those who insist on one way only.
[1] just because it is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSj5stmFkQ0
I mentioned what sounds like potentially a shibboleth aspect reluctantly, with a sense that might be misleading. I should've characterized it better.
Maybe less like a shibboleth, and my thought was more like "We can have this higher-bandwidth communication, if I don't drop the ball" or "This is a person from my hometown or who shares my native language, and it would be stupid to use a different language, or not fallback to my hometown accent".
I don't really care if it's "netiquette" or not, but I nearly always want to reply to separate parts of an email with separate responses.. and writing inline replies is literally the only way to do that while being clear as to what you're replying to.
If it's a scrappy "yes" "no" type email then top posting is fine by me.
> something they said below
so that the context is still there inline, but anything irrelevant isn't, you still get the new message as the first thing (which frankly most clients seem to expect), just seems strictly better than bottom-posting and messing up the order & what's reply vs. replied-to to me.
But, this requires more careful editing of the email (e.g. to trim irrelevant quoted text), in order to remain easy to read. So as a default for lazy^H^H^H^H^H people in a hurry, top-posting makes sense, IMO.
What I wish for is a script to "correct" the order of e-mails botched by top posters. Having that would save me some time whenever I feel the need to manually unwrap a conversation. But I have never managed to find one (lacking in web search skills?), so perhaps I should attempt to write one some day?