[danielhunt]

I tend to read comments, and not articles - as a result, sometimes I wish that HN had a special `TLDR` subsection, directly below a posting, that used vote-based mechanics for the selection of a post like this.

Kudos to you for such a concise summary :thumbsup:

[alexandrerond]

Part of the problem is that the title of this article (and many others these days) is pure clickbait. :/

[jacobolus]

The NY Review of Books is still primarily designed as a print publication. The title here shows up on their table of contents page, so you might better describe it as “flipbait”. Notice that on the NYRB ToC page, the title of the book under review – Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts – is also printed, giving additional context to the review.

There’s nothing especially “these days” about magazine essay titles with puns in them. Catching a reader’s eye and enticing him to start reading is the title’s primary purpose. This isn’t a newspaper story, where the reader might be trying to get a clear idea of the day’s main events just by skimming the headlines.

[thearn4]

I normally really cringe when I see "TLDR" and "ELI5" all over the comments of every post in places like reddit (where the original piece is thoughtful and well worth a full read), but I am starting to appreciate its role when content has such click-bait titles.

[corecoder]

Same, especially when titles are so cryptic (linkbaity?).

[Kenji]

If people wouldn't link to garbage there wouldn't be a need for TL;DR because a high quality news article is already minimized and compact. This is a cultural problem on HN, since a year or so we've seen a massive increase in "bla bla" articles reaching the top (at least it feels that way).

[debrangy]

Terrible. The TLDR given by OP completely misses the point of the article. The scrolls aren't a revolutionary discovery because of what they contain, but because of what implications can be drawn as a result (which you'll have to read the article).

[ww520]

The article is a good read. I like the triple word play in the last sentence, "For them, he held a key to the present: the past."

[saiya-jin]

same here, same here