Sigh

[yendi]

So a person of color posts a reply (responding to a thread Jim Hines's excellent piece here) a long, well-written post about the issues he's faced in fandom as a POC to a mailing list, including some really offensive stuff that has happened to him.

First line of the first response is "I find top posting offensive."

And it goes on from there (the same asshole who made that post and then dismissed a whole bunch of the initial poster's concerns also claims, of course, that Rene Walling was Just Misunderstood.)

Of course, I can't give more info about the person who posted or where they did so, since it's a list that's notorious for getting itself worked up whenever anyone dares quote it, but I can say that this is the sort of shit that makes many rational people think that the best thing that could happen to self-identified SMOFs would be for them to stick their faces in blenders and frappe away.

(And yes, there have been intelligent responses by people who aren't assholes, too. But it's a crappy ratio.)

Comments

[phi]

This list wouldn't start with "s" and rhyme with "fuck off" would it?

I don't get the complaint about "top posting" at all -- from your description it sounds like the reply was not responding point-by-point to Jim's points but was a general reaction piece. Maybe it's just because of my inferior paki brain.

[yendi]

Good guess!

In fairness, it was both (actually a point-by-point response to the POC's post responding to someone else). But leading with that sets a tone of assholicness that pervades the entire post.

[phi]

Ah, I meant, it doesn't sound like the POC's initial message was a point-by-point reference to Jim's blog post. Too many vague antecedents in my first comment.

[ron_newman]

The first reply that I see there makes a quite reasonable argument about photography, and doesn't mention "top posting" at all.

[yendi]

"to a mailing list." I'm talking about something happening in response to that post, not the post itself.

[greylistening.livejournal.com]

Too often, the ratio is crappy. Too often.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

"this is the sort of shit that makes many rational people think that the best thing that could happen to self-identified SMOFs would be for them to stick their faces in blenders and frappe away."

This made my evening.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's just fandom. The anti-topposting thing was elsewhere in Usenet, too. I remember one Usenet client that would detect an attempt at a top post and preach against it.