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It's also useful to other users when someone is using it to summarize a scientific or niche post which other uses might not understand, putting the story into layman's terms.
Hear. Hear. I think of Hacker News as a community of people who know how to read, and who appreciate good writing. Submissions to Hacker News should be from reliable sources and submitted with the original article titles in the first place,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933
so the reader should already receive a signal from the submission and its title that it is worth a read to the end, and a signal of what the article is about.
And often the point of stories on HN is not some tiny summary or moral, but a long article with many different points and data that are hard to summarize.
Yes. The best submissions to HN have some consideration of more points of view than just the author's point of view, and will be harder to condense to a one-line summary than the articles that need not even be submitted here.
Also, I'd argue that reading a long piece (especially if it contains an illustrative story) is much more memorable than a summary like this.
Agreed with this too. A pithy point embedded in a carefully reasoned article with pertinent examples and discussions of alternative points of view is actually better understood, and better remembered, than the same pithy point written in isolation.
Here's to the readers who still read writing longer than one sentence. Be bold in submitting articles that are more than five paragraphs long. Invite your fellow participants on HN to be absorbed for a few minutes in THINKING about a detailed, nuanced argument. Encourage the submission of articles with analysis and factual detail by upvoting those articles. Reward your fellow readers by submitting and upvoting articles worth reading in full.
P.S. My user profile here on HN begins with a one-liner tl;dr summary. Yes, that is a joke, although the summary is accurate.
Yes, sometimes, but ...
1. Many people have limited reading time.
2. Many topics can be accurately distilled to a few words with no loss of meaning.
3. Economy of expression is highly esteemed in journalism, and it can often be accomplished with no loss of useful content.
Some tl;dr endeavors fall flat, and/or excise the meat along with the fat. Some succeed admirably.
Many submitted essays seem to have been written by someone who expects to be paid by the word, therefore the more words, the better. Such essays are often greatly improved through distillation.
So, in my humble opinion, no conclusion can be drawn -- each tl;dr effort should be judged on its merits.
I will close with my favorite tl;dr story, in which Woody Allen says, "I took a speed-reading course so I could read 'War and Peace'. It's about Russia."
:) ... I see this often on very long stories and ones which are tough to read (like a nitty-gritty physics story). I don't see a problem when used judiciously. Plus the up/down-voting usually only surfaces tl;dr's when they're actually good and needed.
What's absolutely terrible are Slashdot-like forums where they give an official TL;DR for every story. I think /. quality would improve greatly if they removed these.
I always thought tl;dr was some sort of utf 8 encoded symbol or something that didn't come across on my browser.