On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Jonas Luster wrote:
* Todd Suiter sez:
It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic to the 'net.
While being guilty of being a top poster many times, I generally do prune the text below. I completely agree with you about people not pruning. I have a customer who for whatever reason can't remember to just send email to noc@ and instead, finds the last email he sent to me and just top-posts to it. I've gotten a few that had messages months old appended to the bottom. <g>
I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of netizenship.
I wouldn't consider this an acid test with respect to either. I've been connected since 1985 and still top-post at times.
American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might see my point here, I guess.
There are times where your reply, although it contributes to the topic at hand, may be much shorter than the message to which you are responding. If you're posting a two sentence response to a 2 page dissertation that someone else posted in a thread, it is much less time consuming for other readers to see your response and signature at the top with the referenced post below. I can't count how many times I've had to scroll down 3 pages to see a response like "I agree. ---sig". I guess this is a good reason to either not top-post or to at least prune the information below your post to those points you're to which you're responding.
So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your new life as a bottom-poster.
OK. So, the lesson we've learned today is: TOP POSTER = BOTTOM FEEDER? ;-) --- John Fraizer EnterZone, Inc