quoting netiquette

[Neil Van Dyke]

Would anyone else like to see a move back to old-school netiquette on
Racket-Users, regarding minimal quoting in posts?

The huge top-quoting and bottom-quoting on the Racket list of late is
getting harder for me to skim than it needs to be.

Pre-Web, it used to generally be good netiquette to do minimal quoting,
with replies in-line. Quoting the entire message was for non-technical
Eudora users on corporate email lists, and for September frosh who just
arrived on campus and discovered Usenet.

I know some of the readers nowadays collapse quoted text, like the
Google Groups Web interface does, but not everyone uses those readers,
nor thinks that is a good idea. Threaded readers have been around for
20 years, and helped solve the problem of being able to very easily look
backward in the thread, to see what was being responded to, if one did
not already know from following the thread.

If this annoys only me, I can tolerate it. I mention this in case there
are a good number of us, and it's happening for no reason.

[Benjamin Greenman]

+1

I'd be thankful if quotes gave only the minimal necessary context.

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[Robby Findler]

Irony alert. 

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[Neil Van Dyke]

BTW, there are a few obnoxious things that Google Groups is doing,
resulting in what traditionally would be considered poor netiquette.
The person posting is not necessarily aware of how Google Groups is
messing up their post. But we might be able to reduce the huge-quotes,
by raising awareness with people, despite however far up Google's thumbs
have been thrust.

[Alexander McLin]

I'm thinking the recent increase of quote-heavy replies is a conflation of two factors. The proliferation of mobile phones and perhaps a large percentage of users on this mailing list is reading the emails on their mobile device.

Mobile devices makes it difficult to extract and isolate the quote you wants. For example I mostly read on my mobile phone and to respond to this thread, I had to jump on my computer instead because I found it too difficult to quote on my phone. 

Plus I've noticed that today email clients, from Gmail to Outlook tends to collapse previous email content behind an ellipse symbol or otherwise make them nearly visible unless you think to explicitly expand the content.

Both of those factors plus the human tendency to take the path of least resistance may be contributing to those excessively quote heavy replies.

Aλexander McLin

[Alexander McLin]

Er I meant to say make email content nearly invisible, rather than visible.

[George Neuner]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 07:28:49 -0400, Neil Van Dyke
<ne...@neilvandyke.org> wrote:

>... Threaded readers have been around for

>20 years, and helped solve the problem of being able to very easily look
>backward in the thread, to see what was being responded to, if one did
>not already know from following the thread.

Quotes must be attributed correctly, else "who said what?" quickly
becomes impossible to follow - even with threading.

Search engines frequently land in the middle of a thread and it is not
true that one can always "very easily look backward" to see what has
been responded to ... Google isn't that easy to use, and it is not the
only site that mirrors and/or indexes Usenet groups.

George