Indeed, I find trailing content very useful in reminding me what is being discussed. I am on a very large number of discussion groups and I find it difficult to remember what a new message responding to a thread is discussing without some previous messages to put this in context. I get over 500 email messages daily. One persons poison can be another persons medicine.
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@...
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On Wed, 8 Feb 2017, J_Catlady wrote:
On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 01:26 pm, Brian Vogel wrote:
I'll add, probably much to Shal's dismay, that the trend toward "automating
everything" just results in more and more and more having to be automated because
users are never taught how to do simple things themselves.
Brian, I never took you for such a Luddite. ;) Are you also against calculators and automated
spreadsheets? Seriously: Shal has made the (very obvious) point that it is increasingly difficult
to trim posts on most phones. So automation via the top-posting algorithm has done nothing more
than mitigate a problem caused by automation in the first place. I don't understand the hysteria
about "teaching people to trim their posts." I was on a mailing list a couple of years ago where
the moderators were constantly haranguing everyone about that. It just made them sound to me like
little tyrants, exercising the little power they had to slap people on the wrist.
My view, as a former software engineer and designer, is that we should make things as easy for
users as possible.
I also love my automatic dishwasher. Yeah, I barely know how to scrub a glass any more, but so
what, as long as my dishwasher works? And when it breaks down, and I complain, I don't want to be
lectured on how, in the olden days, people used to know how to wash their own dishes!
J?
