"TLDR" is unnecessary
douglastarr.com
"TLDR" is unnecessary
1–10 of 101 posts
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#2I think this a great point. If you're in the habit of writing a TLDR for articles, maybe you can try writing the TLDR and then afterwards removing the 4 letters "TLDR" and leaving the sentence there. It's great to summarize in the first sentence.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#3But how does the reader know you are one of the authors that summarise succinctly at the beginning of every article? Especially as they reader may read many articles of differing quality a day. tl;dr to me, is like statically typed English, it improves readability if you know to look for it.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#4Pedantic, but: tldr existed well before reddit.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#5"p.s." is kind of unnecessary too these days but you can still use it. I like "TL;DR". I think of it as a sub-headline.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#6It's the same basic principle as newspaper articles, or the essay format you were taught in school: summary first, details later. Or make your points up front, then prove them.
That only solves a part of the problem, though. Highly upvoted long comments on Reddit are particularly frustrating because so many of them have content that's weak or just plain wrong. I'm convinced that only a small fraction of voters actually read them.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#7Great point, although tl;dr works for short comments, whereas the "trick" of putting the summary in the beginning of a text needs some actual "body" before it works - otherwise it is just confusing.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#8I disagree. While something that is well written shouldn't need a tldr, it does service as a device for people who consume a lot of text. Its a standard shorthand indicating the author did in fact write a summary
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#9TLDR is just a warning to the reader that the rest of the text might not be worth his time. It also helps to make explicit that the paragraph following it is a summary of the post.
Re: "TLDR" is unnecessary
#10It's the same basic principle as newspaper articles, or the essay format you were taught in school: summary first, details later. Or make your points up front, then prove them. That only solves a part of the problem, though. Highly upvoted long comments on Reddit are particularly frustrating because so many of them have content that's weak or just plain wrong. I'm convinced that only a small fraction of voters actual…
There is also a strong bias toward upvoting more visible content. Higher-voted comments appear first on the page, getting more exposure. For that reason I’ve made it a habit to read comments in bottom-to-top order, in order to artificially make my votes more fair.