Why top posting has won (2018)
74 comments
·May 25, 2025akkartik
benoliver999
Yeah this is my strategy. The top/bottom post brigade are both happy and email clients seem to handle it well.
It's kind of alarming to me that the default in say gmail is to constantly re-send the original message chain back and forth. I guess it then gives the whole chain to newcomers to the thread?
addaon
I agree.
> Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete dichotomy.
There are just so many options.
arp242
I think this hugely overthinks things and it's actually a lot simpler: Outlook and other Microsoft tools didn't support bottom-posting. It was only kind-of possible if you changed several settings and even then you had to manually change stuff in every reply. That by far the most important reason top-posting "won".
I use past tense because I haven't used any of this Microsoft stuff for over 10 years, but I assume this is still the case.
This sort of moves the question to "why did Outlook only support top-posting?" I don't have a clear answer to that, but if I look at the general state of Microsoft and email at the time then it's probably a combination of the Not-Invented-Here (and maybe some "EEE") attitude at Microsoft at the time combined with a general apathy and ignorance towards email.
SoftTalker
Yes exactly. The first text-based email clients I used that quoted the original message in a reply[1] defaulted to bottom posting. They'd include the message with the ">" prefix on each line, and your cursor would be positioned at the bottom of that. So at that time most people did inline or bottom replies.
Microsoft Email/Exchange/Outlook as best I can remember have always defaulted to quoting the message and leaving the cursor at the top. And they didn't prefix the quoted text in any way, so to do inline replies you'd have to make it clear which text was quoted and which text was new. People would use colors or different fonts when "rich" text became supported but it was more work and most people just took the easy path.
[1] Very early on, MUAs did not (at least by default) quote the original message. This was because most people were using teletypes or slow (300 baud) terminals and possibly a line-oriented editor such as 'ed' so quoting the original message could add significant extra time needed to compose a reply. Also, with a mail client that does proper threading, you can see which message is being replied to and you don't really need to include that again in the reply.
beej71
I switched back to mutt after years of TB and, man, is it sooo easy to quote inline. I'd missed it. I'm sure a bunch of recipients are wondering wtf I'm doing. :)
stock_toaster
I'd say Gmail defaulting[1] to top posting, when it was publicly released in 2004, was definitely the nail in the coffin.
[1]: Likely done for reasons of Outlook compatibility/familiarity.
pwg
> I assume this is still the case.
It is, $job's outlook install still "top posts" by default, just like always.
rixed
There is no such thing as "supporting [top/bottom] posting". You have a text editor and a cursor, the real alternative is not "top" vs "bottom" but "I care about the context of the discussion" vs "I don't care". In the first case, you edit the quoted text and then answer inline, and in the second you just type your one line answer and hit "send".
Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
layer8
This is incorrect. The initial cursor position and automatic email signature being at the top rather than at the bottom already makes a huge difference. Add to that the absence of tools to easily insert inline replies and cut down or reformat quoted parts, plus the absence of navigational behavior when reading mail that would jump to the first non-quoted part first, which earlier email clients used to have.
arp242
Yes, when I had to use Outlook because of $dayjob I did bottom-post and it was absolutely an uphill battle. In the end I resorted to some custom VBScript code I wrote myself to make some aspects easier.
In hindsight, all of that was a mistake because all my coworkers top-posted. Top-posting might be bad (IMHO), but a mixture of bottom and top is even worse.
I now just top-post. I'm still not a fan but it is what it is.
rixed
Ah, let's not get started about "Why email signatures has won" :)
arp242
> Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
In addition to what the sibling comment already points out, most people don't even know what "top posting" or "bottom posting" is because they just do what the email client does by default (which in Outlook's case: strongly favours top posting).
The only "lazy" thing here is this kind of smug judgemental attitude instead of looking for the actual reasons.
champtar
If you are using Microsoft Outlook mobile app or the webmail, inline or bottom posting experience is garbage, it doesn't quote/format the previous email, it just slaps it at the bottom. If you want to respond inline you better put some color else it's unreadable.
csallen
I've always been fascinated by aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and those sorts of things. What is it that makes them so enduring, so satisfying, and so seemingly true? Why are we attracted to this form of expression moreso than longer and better-argued prose? Do things merely seem more true simply because they are wittily expressed, and if so, is that a good thing? (PG's recent essay had interesting things to say about this.)
Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld:
- "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us."
- "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples"
- "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong."
- "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears."
- "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."
- "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones."
- "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them."
My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place, because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the conclusions of others.
kjkjadksj
Language is fundamentally an abstraction of some more complex thought. To then repeat the exercise, to take complex language and distill it again to a simple abstraction in a few words, is probably deeply satisfying to our monkey brain.
CooCooCaCha
Your last paragraph fascinates me because I think it’s true.
There’s something about being told things directly that pushes people away, but a clever aphorism disarms us because it makes us feel smart for “getting it”.
There’s something inside us that prefers indirect communication.
erikerikson
> There’s something inside us that prefers indirect communication.
This may come from culture or neurodiversity. Some of us greatly prefer explicit communication.
CooCooCaCha
Sorry I forgot the standard caveats that generalizations don’t apply to everyone.
neilv
One of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the history of the email thread up to that point, but it's missing emails (because of concurrency with possibly multiple replies going on at once, and because of cherry-picking or randomly-picking which subtree to respond to).
Even in a back-and-forth between 2 people, there are some people who'll reply a second time to the same email, not to replace their earlier response, but to add more information.
(Aside: Also, it seems to be rare for people forwarded a top-posted thread context to actually read it, unless they're looking to assign blame.)
In every company, I end up having to reconstruct context for someone, or do archaeology on some interaction, and the top-quoting both helps and hurts.
Downsides of lazy top-posting for these purposes include having to break out all those messages, and fill in the gaps from maybe multiple copies at different points.
Upsides include when, say, a single email is the only record, and the fact that a bunch of people top-posted means you have more raw information, in the quotes, than if that single email was in a history of people doing proper Netiquette with minimal quoting of the parts they were responding to.
There are a whole bunch of reasons and implications for how things are done in corporate practice, and IME most of them come down to one of: poor tools, poor use of the tools (including by "digital natives"), and corporate misalignment + politics.
thechao
One thing I like about Slack-like message systems is that they naturally bottom post. However, they tend to go "asynchronous", which makes conversiarcheology nearly impossible. I don't understand why I can't click the message I want to reply to and have my response inserted at that point. (With an obvious: it's been too long to do that limiter.) The messages can stay inline, but having the user mark the dependency (even retroactively) could lead to some real tooling & conversation recovery improvements. I dunno; Slack has some sort of Canvas integration which I need like a new hole on my head.
richardwhiuk
People already struggle to use threads in Slack correctly, adding arbitrary nesting of messages doesn't feel like it'd be an improvement.
thechao
Not nesting: the ability (for a little while) to tell slack to locally reorder the conversation. This tends to happen with three users all trying to talk to each other: the communication is still dual, so you end up with "yeahs" and crud like that "out of place". The emoji solve this to a large extent; but, neither well nor articulately.
richard_mcp
I find it to be the exact opposite. Replying in-line is great when it's a short email between a two people. But if the email is to a wide audience, has multiple back and forths, or new people get CC-ed later, in-line posting is much more difficult to follow. It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out who said what while also keeping state of all the different threads.
Top posting takes more effort to do well, but makes it much easier to follow an email chain.
layer8
The point of inline replies is to quote just enough to establish the context of the reply, and to enable replying to multiple separate points without having to separately establish each point as context. Case in point:
> It takes so much effort to read the email to figure out who said what
Email clients used to color each quoting level, and mails started with something like:
John Doe wrote on $date:
> Jane Smith wrote on $date:
> > Joe Shmoe wrote on $date:
> > > what they wrote
> > what they wrote
> what they wrote
> while also keeping state of all the different threads.
That’s why we had threaded views that showed messages in a tree, and showed when the subject (line) changed. People were encouraged to edit the subject line to reflect topic drift, so that you had a good overview when looking at the thread visualization, which would omit repetitions of the same subject text and only show where it changed.
Example (threaded view at top, colored quotes at bottom): https://robot.unipv.it/clipedia/images/mutt-threads.png
dasil003
I don't disagree that top posting is often the result of laziness, but I think the logical thread of the articles starts to break down at this point:
> But when the thread is long, and when your reply is to a point deeper inside, suddenly the receiver has to do a lot of work. You, the sender, have saved yourself time, but the receiver has to do more work than you have saved. Potentially a lot more work.
The problem is that readers are also lazy, and increasingly people don't have time to follow long threads at all. With inline responses, it's far too easy for threads to branch off in a million directions. Once that happens you'll often lose the forest for the trees. It's reasonable for usenet-style internet discussions where participation is voluntary and asynchronous by definition, but in work collaboration it's a strong anti-pattern. In a situation where there is a goal and desired outcome, top-posting is a reasonable way to keep a thread linear and outcome-focused. It can still break down for complex or controversial issues, but in that case email is the wrong medium, instead jump on a call or write a proposal.
ccppurcell
I have similar feelings about voice messages over chat apps. I pretty nearly always read it as "my time is more valuable than yours" especially if it's long. Listening on 2x speed is not as good as skim reading. It should go without saying that I make an exception for people with disabilities.
3036e4
I surrendered a long time ago and started top-posting like normal people do, but a few times I wrote to someone and they replied the old way with just quotes and bottom-posting, and then I immediately revert to that mode myself.
I wish there was some good way to silently communicate that preference to likeminded. Then I would know right away when to switch to proper netiquette without the other person having to go first. And how often was I in an email exchange with someone else that also prefer to not top-post, but both did that anyway since that is just the expectation now?
linker3000
I didn't know there was a competition.
jghn
This was a huge debate on USENET in particular, as well as in the email world until Outlook effectively made top posting the standard.
RFC 1855 [1] makes it clear that the correct way is to quote relevant text and then reply.
richardwhiuk
RFCs aren't really a suitable document for agreeing this sort of communication conventions.
junon
It's been one of those "tabs vs spaces"-like holy wars for a while.
sitkack
(soft) No, no. Tabs vs spaces is more of a butter side up/down thing.
Top Posting is how you assert dominance and gaslight an entire thread while ignoring a nuanced point of view. That complexity is not present in tabs vs spaces.
Aurornis
Consider yourself lucky. I’ve always adapted to the prevailing format of each mailing list, but the people who try to create a holy war out of different styles have always been insufferable.
In a normal office environment e-mail moves much faster, people open threads with the context already in mind, and expect to see the relevant new info at the top. Bottom posting would either make everyone sigh heavily when they see an e-mail from that one person or would earn someone a quick coaching session to adopt the prevailing style of the office environment.
But if you go on to a mailing list that wants bottom posting, that’s what you do. It’s a courtesy.
thom
If you're feeling particularly nostalgic, you can just have an LLM take all your incoming email and tell it to rewrite it so it's no longer top-posted.
dang
Related:
Why Top Posting Has Won (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 - April 2020 (140 comments)
Why Top Posting Has Won - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302808 - June 2018 (3 comments)
jagraff
I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.
I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?
mr_toad
> email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement
It’s still better than a teams call.
bornfreddy
Almost anything is better than any Teams thing.
ColinWright
I've written one, and people who use it, love it. People who look at it from the outside, hate it, hate on it, say hateful things about it, and generally make it clear that it should be set fire to, then buried.
But I and colleagues use it regularly, and it absolutely hits the spot for non-linear discussions that are intended to find conclusions.
Top posting vs replying inline feels like an incomplete dichotomy. I often encounter threads on mailing lists where people are replying inline but not trimming the part they're not replying to. That makes it hard to follow. Or they reply inline and trim well but it's still hard to follow because you need more context than just the part they're replying to.
So the key is "the thread needs to be distilled" as OP puts it. And often that's more work than just finding the right sentence to quote.
My approach these days in my email is:
99% of the time I quote nothing and delete everything my client puts into the compose window, relying on the default thread-view in most email clients to supply the context for my readers.
1% of the time I need to quote, and I quote liberally, treating words as a wiki, and editing/sculpting the text in '> ' just as much as my own reply below it.