> Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline
Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all, it's a unitary response to the full parent post. Which is what bottom-quoting does - it doesn't actually quote the parent post, it leaves it in for reference (which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, are pretty crap at keeping track of conversation threads).
Very few people communicate in the super-structured way that in-line quoting implies, that you go through an email sentence(/line/paragraph) by sentence(/..) and respond individually to them. It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.
>> Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response.
> Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all
I never said that most people do. When you quoted my post in your response, you left off the clause where I said: "if they quote the parent post in their response".
> It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.
This aptly demonstrates that there value quoting the relevant parts of the post you're responding to. In this case, you're attributing statements that someone else made to me. If you want to argue against what you're quoting, then you should reply to the post that actually made those statements.
Bottom quoting means you read the answer before the question, breaking the logical flow of conversation. Not trimming means the messages have a vast amount of text to skip over each time.
The beauty of inline quoting is that if you don't see a need to use it then you don't. It is in no way arrogant to suggest a method of replying which is unambiguous. Nobody is suggesting that it is used in places in which it is not necessary.
I hate to think of the hours wasted due to ambiguity in email replies. More often than not people end up using the telephone or meeting in person which wastes even more time rather than learning how to be clear. I don't understand why all effort to be clear and precise goes out of the window when dealing with email.
Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all, it's a unitary response to the full parent post. Which is what bottom-quoting does - it doesn't actually quote the parent post, it leaves it in for reference (which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, are pretty crap at keeping track of conversation threads).
Very few people communicate in the super-structured way that in-line quoting implies, that you go through an email sentence(/line/paragraph) by sentence(/..) and respond individually to them. It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.