[mansolo]

It's horrifying that we need a TL;DR for a modest chunk of text - a mere comment.

If our attention spans are that fried, are we any better off than the hypothetical guy trying to fill out a government form?

It's a bit like taking someone's synopsis for what the Bible is about. You can't. You have to read it, experience it and parse it yourself or you can't really know.

Myself, I'm not going to pablum-feed you guys a over-simplified short form version of what I think I just read. Read it for yourself.

No wonder libraries are endangered.

[icebraining]

The fact that one person wrote a TL;DR is not an indication that we need one. And besides, usually a TL;DR of someone else's post is an opinionated summary, not a simply condensation of facts.

[zanny]

People write TLDRs for their comments whenever they feel they expended more words on the topic than they feel were necessary, it doesn't imply an expectation that no one else would read it.

When I write a fervent wall of text I think is worthy of reading in full, I don't put on a TLDR, I just pity the fool who doesn't take the time to partake of dense knowledge.

So, TLDR, it is the author feeling the content is lacking in a dense section of text more than the reader having a limited attention span that leads to TLDR's. I think.

[martey]

"TLDR, it is the author feeling the content is lacking in a dense section of text more than the reader having a limited attention span that leads to TLDR's."

There is no evidence that "feralchimp" (who wrote the TLDR here on Hacker News) is the same as "codacorolla" (who wrote the original comment on Metafilter).

[zanny]

I just meant in the general case about TLDR's, not just in one particular instance. Existentialism happpened.

[sliverstorm]

TL;DR we all have short attention spans now, libraries are in trouble.

[derleth]

I'll reconsider the TL;DR when academic papers reconsider the Abstract.