Bottom posting v top posting

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 08:23:45PM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-05-13 09:52, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
> 
> > Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner,
> > prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time,
> > mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom
> > post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle and every
> > war. I now only bottom post to emails on this list. I also never ever
> > see bottom posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week,
> > other than posts to the mutt lists.
> 
> I am on some 30+ lists, and I'd estimate bottom posting is the norm on
> 25.  It is true that gmail users are a small minority on all of them.

Your post encouraged to actually get some figures of the lists I am on. I found
8 lists, not including the mutt list. Only one, a linux users group, used
bottom posting.  The other 7 are 6 lists for specific computational chemistry
programs or issues, and one list related to a wikipedia group, so the people
using them are tech savvy.  All 7 use top posting. 

> I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users,
> and they don't object.  But I think they use computers for email, not
> phones.

I think my two sons and two daughters would understand bottom posting, but they
would not be convinced.  I think all my friends and other relatives would wonder
what I am talking about.
 
> To sum up, the vision you have of almost everybody using phones may be
> the future, but is not yet the present, and I resist accelerating the
> transition.

I have some sympathy with you here, but the wide use of phones is having an
impact.  I read a study the other day about wikipedia. It seems that the number
of people editing pages has deceased and part of this seems to be because more
people are reading wikipedia on phones not computers and it is much harder to
edit wikipedia on a phone than on a computer.

Brian.

-- 
A Computer is like a horse, it will sense weakness.
                                                -- Greg Wettstein
Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke) Email: brian(DOTjames(DOTduke(AT)gmail(DOT)com