[jessriedel]

It's wrong to think that asking for a summary before you decide to read a lengthy article is low class, or ADD, or whatever. Most articles are garbage, and there's nothing impressive about wasting your time. In academia, the tl;dr at the top is called an abstract, and it's crucial for allowing readers to navigate the literature.

[petra]

True. And abstracts actually seems like a really good filter for a search engine.

[jessriedel]

In my dreams, the major link aggregators like reddit, HN, and Facebook distill a crowd-sourced abstract for every article making the rounds on social networks (rather than just compiling loose comments). Then a browser plugin shows them alongside the article.

[tribe]

Isn't this basically how Slashdot works?

[jessriedel]

Not sure what you mean. In the sense that it features user-submitted summaries for links, yes. But there are lots of blogs where each post is a selected link with some sort of background info. (E.g., Marginal Revolution also has this format for many links.) My dream is to have this for all sufficiently popular links going around the internet on a given day, and to let the summary get progressively more refined.