top and bottom posting

[R Kimber]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:28:44 +0100
Chris Jones wrote:

> > The GMail client on Android won't let you bottom-post, so far as I can
> > work out. It provides a text box into which to put your response, to
> > which the quoted text is appended.
 
> Thats pretty piss poor. Someone who actually use these things should 
> complain to google.

I'm guessing they do it that way because most companies (certainly the
ones I've dealt with) do it that way, not because they design the stuff
poorly, but because they have a different approach to information.  If you
contact a company about something your query is often dealt with by several
people, each of whom may (or may not) need to have the full correspondence
to make sense of what's going on, and the longer the message gets the less
efficient it is for them to bottom post, especially for respondents that
don't need to read it all. So, it seems to me that, for them, unsnipped
top-posting is efficient.

A group like this seems to prefer snipped bottom-posting.  I'm guessing
that this culture originally arose in the days of rather more primitive
computer systems where you had no choice but to bottom post (or, at least
it was very inefficient to top-post - I certainly remember such things in
the 1970s), and has since been reinforced and perpetuated by other
justifications.

Personally, I've always thought that not snipping is infinitely more
irritating than top-posting, most of the arguments against which seem to
imply a certain inflexibility of mind.  I bottom post here because that's
what most other people in this group seem to prefer. If I write to a
company, I'm happy to fall in with their top-posting.

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber
Political Science Resources
http://www.PoliticsResources.net