A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?
Tim said:
And any newsreader I know of starts you at the top of the message,
both reading and writing.
That's to make it easy for us to trim the quoted material before
bottom posting our reply.
"Posting at the top because that's where the cursor
happened to be is like shitting in your pants because
that's where your assholec happened to be."
- Philip Herlihy
Short blurbs like this here following a comment make sense, but
people who quote three, four, nine, 25KB of posts simply have
absolutely no justification (though they still flame the ****
out of 'ya if you call them on it, go figure).
That is worse than top posting. Which is like saying that
Curly Joe is the Intellectual Stooge.
Here are some references for those who are interested
in improving the quality of their posts to newsgroups:
--------------------------------------------------------
"When thou enter a city, abide by its customs."
Quoting Style in Newsgroup Postings
http://www.xs4all.nl/~wijnands/nnq/nquote.html
How do I quote correctly in usenet?
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html
Common Mistakes in Usenet Postings and How to Avoid Them
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/mail-news-errors.html#quoting
Bottom vs. top posting and quotation style on Usenet
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html
Why bottom-posting is better than top-posting
http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
+What do you mean "my reply is upside-down"?
http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/quote.html
Put an end to Outlook Express's messy quotes with this automated fix!
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/
From (spit!) microsoft:
"When including text from a previous message in the thread,
trim it down to include only text pertinent to your response.
Your response should appear below the quoted information."
-
http://www.jsiinc.com/newsgroup_document.htm
"Top posting classically or stereotypically involves no
trimming and of course no contextualizing.of prior posts;
contrasted with contextualized posts, which sequence
questions and responses in order and context, along
with trimming of unnecessary lines.
In this contrast, the top post is disorderly, messy,
and most notably egocentrical, because it leaves all
of the cleaning up and reorganization to the correspondent
context posters and because it inappropriately emphasizes
the importance of whatever the top poster has to say or
ask while mostly disregarding everything anyone else has
been said before. It also expects the next reader to try
to guess at what part of the previous posts the top poster
is referring.and makes it nearly impossible to
contextualize hir own responses." -Mike Easter