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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (cyhmn)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:24am on 2017-10-30

"Just because it's easy to quote everything doesn't mean it's a good idea. Quoting something is an implicit claim to the reader that it's necessary to re-read it to understand the reply. Disk space and bandwidth have become cheap and plentiful, but human attention is still a very limited resource, and will forever remain so. (Or at least until the Singularity.)" -- Keith F. Lynch, 2017-10-21, rec.arts.fandom (Message-ID: <osfho9$8q6$1@reader2.panix.com>)

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There are 5 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
madfilkentist: My cat Florestan (gray shorthair) (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] madfilkentist at 09:45am on 2017-10-30
Probably it's worth mentioning that Keith was writing in the context of Usenet threads. What he was talking about applies to email threads as well, where people insist on replying above a copy of the entire previous message, which includes a copy of the entire message before that...

I call it the "12 Days of Christmas" style.
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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 10:56am on 2017-10-30
One can argue that top-posting is about maintaining a complete record of the conversation (um ... in case you need to forward the entire conversation to somebody else some day?) rather than quoting for context. Of course, it's a pretty inefficient way to keep that record, especially if you have a threaded mail reader, and it makes the times when you _do_ want to quote for context kind of strange. You can break top-posting (my usual answer), do both (redundant and getting more so with each reply), or just assume the reader will look for the context in the quoted conversation below (which brings us smack dab into Keith's observation again). So yeah, in my book, barring some special circumstances, what he said applies to email as well, if a wee bit less strongly because most folks just don't bother to scroll down.

As for top-posting in general, a QotD from 2003:
A: Yes.
| Q: Are you sure?
| | A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
| | | Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
Edited Date: 2017-10-30 10:57 am (UTC)
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metahacker: A picture of white-socked feet, as of a person with their legs crossed. (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] metahacker at 11:50am on 2017-10-30
Frustratingly this pattern has carried over to the modern age in Twitter form...
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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 09:46pm on 2017-10-30

In general, yeah, but when I see something interesting that looks like the end or middle of a conversation I want to see the rest of, often (i.e. if both parties used the 'reply' button instead of just making new tweets from scratch), I can just click on one of the messages and get a thread in first-at-top order. In a long thread I might have to click on the topmost tweet shown to get farther back in the thread.

Still, as you note, reading one's feed one sees everything backward.

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metahacker: A picture of white-socked feet, as of a person with their legs crossed. (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] metahacker at 01:46pm on 2017-10-31
The addition of the 'reply chain' feature made things a lot better. The one that still gets me is quoted tweets:

"Yes!

[thing I quoted]"

But at least it's not nested (any more).
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