[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.