On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 04:04:15AM -0000, lukhman_khan wrote: > Its quite obvious. Top posting helps save time > Awfully painful to scroll down to the signal
The opposite. You first have to figure what the fuck the post was replying to. If you have to scroll to see the first line of replies you're Doing It Wrong(tm). For more context there's threading information http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/message-threading.html (but top-posters tend to be clueless enough to not know what MessageID and threading is anyway, so they instead of creating a new post they cheerfully reply to an existing thread, or use braindead MUAs which munge MessageIDs for no reason). Speaking about braindead MUAs, some people use proprietary braindead MUAs which can't edit worth spit, yet somehow have the gall to consider it our problem. Excuse me? My Android Gmail sucks, that's why I never reply to mailing lists on the road. And if you think you're important enough to chime in on everything, it's not that full-featured netbooks with 3/3.5 G built-in are not cheap enough. Or wait until you get back home before you reply. > How much extra effort does it take to simply > delete the hundred extra lines of irrelevant text? Precisely. If you can't be arsed to make your missive maximally agreeable for maximum number of readers (frequently thousands of people, integrate over the cumulated aggravation, and cringe) don't expect that people want to read you. Especially people who value their time, which tend to be the people you want to reach. And if you don't want to spend any brain cycles your-side maximizing your readership, chances are excellent you're not worth reading anyway. Maybe you're a statistical outlier. But do your readers know that? Consider the handicap. Such attitude might appear elitist, and arrogant. And it probably is. But you're not master of my time, and considering that I typically spend hours each day reading email the patience tends to be rather thin. Consider what is more offensive, being told to change your ways, or being killfiled silently. I think the latter definitely is, but I'm willing to reconsider. It will certainly save on fingertip wear on my end. The problem is that I've written dozens variants of this mail over the last decade or two. Is this a good use of my time? Probably not. > I love it when someone quotes just the very > relevant lines of the original message and > that too interleaved and placed exactly above > the reply/rebuttal. Exactly. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
