Susan,
Curious, I find the reverse to be true. Since I usually read in threads, I find that having to scroll through the last part to get to the current part mildly annoying.
The information flow problem is that messages, especially email, don't always arrive and sort threaded. This is problem is further compounded because somebody could reply today to a message that was deleted from your Inbox or expired from your news server days or even weeks ago. Without interposting, you have no idea where the reply fits into the thread. If you are a reader that typically reads through an entire thread, when it's essentially dead, and don't mind the occasional reply that's out of place because somebody has their clock out of sync, or the time zone set incorrectly, then that's fine for you. But top-posting still makes things more difficult for just about everybody else.
The byte flow problem, is the one that directly affects Cliff and the digests. Unfortunately, 99.9999% of Top-Posters neglect to trim the quoted message to the relevant material. That wastes huge amounts of bandwidth. Another thing to remember here, is that Usenet and email are international, and that the US is pretty much the only place where almost everybody can get internet access without per-byte or per-minute charges. Please note I typed "almost everybody" -- There are still places in the US where there are no local access numbers and people have to pay per-minute line charges in order to access their "unlimited" internet accounts.
There really are no valid reasons to top-post, but there are plenty of valid reasons to inter-post and trim the quoted material. That's why it's been a flameable action on Usenet for over twenty years. Top-posting has only become more common in recent years because OE and a few other email/newsreader hybrids (that really don't do either well) make it tough to reply correctly and newbies are showing up everyday, not just in the first couple of weeks in September. Insisting on top-posting and not trimming the quoted material, especially when there's replies that have already been right-posted (aka inter-posted), I hate to say it, is just plain rude and self serving. Please take a moment and read the material listed in the two links previously provided. If you missed them, here they are again:
<http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
<http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting>
Ray
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