Thread:Feedback/Social effects of quoting

Joel Spolsky (the guy behind StackOverflow, amongst other things) has an interesting article explaining why his forum has no quoting feature. To quote the relevant part:

 Q. Why don't you show me the post I'm replying to, while I compose my reply?

A. Because that will tempt you to quote a part of it in your own reply. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of quoting will increase the fluidity of the conversation, making topics interesting to read. Whenever someone quotes something from above, the person who reads the topic has to read the same thing twice in a row, which is pointless and automatically guaranteed to be boring.

Sometimes people still try to quote things, usually because they are replying to something from three posts ago, or because they're mindlessly nitpicking and they need to rebut 12 separate points. These are not bad people, they're just programmers, and programming requires you to dot every i and cross every t, so you get into a frame of mind where you can't leave any argument unanswered any more than you would ignore an error from your compiler. But I'll be damned if I make it EASY on you. I'm almost tempted to try to find a way to show posts as images so you can't cut and paste them. If you really need to reply to something from three posts ago, kindly take a moment to compose a decent English sentence ("When Fred said blah, he must not have considered..."), don't litter the place with your <<<>>>s.

I'm inclined to agree with him in that easy quoting tends to encourage arguments for the sake of arguments, and lot of minor nitpicking while missing the main point. (See our mailing lists for a demonstration.) Also, quotes take a lot of space, and threads already take up a lot of space as it is.