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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why TL;DR requests are being consistently down voted. Sometimes this is not a "too long don't CARE to read" but rather "I'm not sure I'm getting what this is about without investing a few hours into it so please kind Sirs and Ladies, can you sum up in a sentence?". Thanks for responding, responders.

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For me, "TL;DR" inevitably implies a certain laziness. If a person really means, "I tried to understand this but I'm not getting it", maybe they could say that.

Given that the top reply to this post is a copy and paste from the first paragraph of the about page, I could see why people suspect the querent did not work very hard before posting, and so values their own time more than that of other people here. That might not be true, but I think it's on the asker to make that clearer, not the readers to guess.

Fair enough. This is the old implicit vs explicit argument.

I skimmed the page up and down and couldn't find what it was all about.

And I redid that same thing before posting the TL;DR;

Then that would have been a good thing to say. If you say you didn't read something when you actually did, you can't blame people for taking you at your word.

I've seen these kind of requests received better when they're phrased "Is anyone with more experience in the field able to summarise what's cool about this?"

tl;dr on this guy's post?

Funny. Take an upvote :)

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