(last one I swear) IF a thread gets to be that long, it belongs in a newsgroup or forum. And, personally, I don't like editing other folks' stuff, stupid or not, i think of their words as their property... (and I honestly can't figure out why I'm contributing to this thread:)) t On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Jonas Luster wrote:
* Todd Suiter sez:
: People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and
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.
Now let's just think for less than 3 seconds about the guys who make Mailing Lists happen. These guys and gals do it - in most cases - out of enthusiasm, paying bandwidth and server resources so _you_ can read and post. Adding extra traffix to their tab does not strike me as social behavior at all.
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. That might just be me and should not influence your preferences, tho. Neither should the fact that in most European and 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.
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.