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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

All: please don't use "tl;dr" on Hacker News. It's fine, of course, to point out relevant details from an article. But it should be part of a considered comment of your own.

HN values intellectual substance. Good reading, writing, and thinking take time. If we're to have high-quality discussion, we need to inhibit the reflex to snap judgment and give the slower and quieter reflective process a chance to function. Since memes like "tl;dr" are emblems of that shallow reflex, we should heed the broken windows theory and not have them here.

(Not picking on any individual here; PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.)

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I wholeheartedly disagree. Much of the content on HN is long form journalism, some is content that is so specifically specialized in a field, that only those with thesis in that field will understand. Part of the brilliance of conversation on the web is interactions between disparate fields. On may articles, if I have to read all the way through a theoretical physics post and understand it without a synopsis, I wouldn't be able to add any value to the conversation, and the thread becomes an echo chamber. The initialism tl;dr does matter, because it's a clean and easy way to identify the content that someone looking for a synopsis will look for.

I understand the goal. HN doesn't want to become reddit, and values engaged discussion. But tl;dr isn't reddit, and it isn't going away. Language is ever evolving, and the way we talk today would have sent my granddad into a tizzy. Part of being a platform, and HN is a platform for ideas and conversations, is that the people will decide how to manage that relationship. Moderation can only trim the edges, and remove the bad actors, but the tonne and tools will not be set by moderation, but rather cultivation by the users.

I agree with you about specialized content, but this has nothing to do with "tl;dr".

The best HN threads are already great at giving context and making clear what a story is about. (That's usually how I learn what stories are about.) And yes, no one has time to read every specialized paper or the expertise to understand all of them. That's why we often prefer a high-quality popular article, when one exists, to specialized literature. Original papers typically get linked to in the comments anyway, for those who want them.

All of this is good and necessary. But none of it requires "tl;dr".

"Tl;dr" is an equivalent in comments to the linkbait gimmicks that we edit out of titles, and it should be kept out of HN comments for the same reason. We're not asking you to make the effort of reading every article or understanding every specialty, just the effort of looking at an HN thread for its content, without gimmickry.

I very much question the value of a comment from someone who is incapable of understanding the source material linked in the submission in the first place. If it's so technical you need somebody elses slimmed down (and likely faulty) synopsis to even comprehend it how likely is it that your comment truly contributes to the discussion?

I would encourage you to re-think this stance. Interdisciplinary conversation is a tremendous tool to approaching hard problems, conversions, and ideas. I've encountered this enough in my life to know it to be very beneficial. We get arrogant when we specialize, often missing simple solutions because we assume that the solution has to be hard because we're very smart, and we haven't effectively solved it yet.

I've often had aha moments when someone who didn't understand the problem, framed a question in a way that caused me to reconsider my approach.

Besides, jargon, not comprehension, is what keeps many smart people out of conversations that they can definitely add value.

I don't see the tl;dr as you do, but if that's the perception of most people, then I am in error.

tl;dr is a perfectly useful meme, better (IM(NS)HO) than such dry fluff as "abstract", "summary", what-have-you.

We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) But we are all of us limited in our time and attention.

I consider tl;dr on HN a form of curation: "Here is a pithy summary as to why you should, perchance, take the time to read TFA."

Many is the time I have RTFAd only because of a tl;dr provided by another HNer, headlines being worth less than the paper on which they were never even written. I attempt humbly (who the frak am I kidding?) to return the favour to others.

"Please don't"? WTF for? Some memes have utility, anything that enables communication and understanding is good.

IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV. IANAL but I don't see how that's relevant.

Of course there can be value in a synopsis. The synposis in your comment was fine. But "tl;dr" doesn't add anything about the topic at hand. What it signals is: "you don't need to read anything else". On HN, readers should be reading for themselves, thinking and deciding this for themselves.

We want users to have to work a little. The key is "a little". It's not like it's hard, but it requires engaging one of the slower cognitive gears. That gear shift is annoying if we expect everything to be laid out for us. On HN we try to thwart that expectation. Why? We want fiber—thoughts and comments of substance.

It's fashionable to talk about opinionated design. One opinion baked into HN's design is: this should be the kind of site that people who don't want to be reflective find boring. When pg was showing me how to moderate HN he said the front page should be "bookish".

You wrote something here that I find fascinating:

> We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.)

What's fascinating is the "of course". It seems so obvious that it's irritating to have to say it. It's such a cliché that there's even a cliché follow-up: "But we are all of us limited in our time and attention".

But, on reflection, it's not true. We mostly value a stimulus-response reward cycle. We value having our preconceptions mirrored back to us. We value the feeling that we understand things (recognition) more than the effort of working through material in order partly to understand it. This is also the dynamic in flamewars, so substance and civility are related.

There can't be many of us who are free from this—certainly not me. But HN is an experiment in trying to grapple with this problem on the internet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). That's what this site is. It may not do it well, and is probably doomed, but the driving idea has always been "maybe we can stave off doom a little longer".

> You're ignoring the elephant, which is that "tl;dr" stands for "too long, didn't read".

As much as "Good-bye" stands for "God be with ye", in that in each case that's what the expression was shortened from. But, in actual use, that's not what it generally means -- at least, for tl;dr, when it is used with other content rather than standing as a comment on its own.

Not sure you're helping your case by invoking a 400-year-old example. Tell you what, let's split the difference: if "tl;dr" is in use 200 years from now, I'll take your point. I'll even give you 95%! If "tl;dr" is in use 20 years from now, I'll take your point.

(But now I'm curious, so as an aside: what's the most recent abbreviation that has totally lost its original meaning? It certainly isn't "tl;dr".)

In the meantime, it's clear that "tl;dr" is there to signal something like "The Cliff's Notes Version". If it were a headline, the headline would be: "15 Easy Words You Should Read Right Now That Tell You All You Need To Know". There's a good reason why we don't want headlines like that on HN, and for the same reason, we should guard against that quality in comments.

It's not as if HN threads are so hard and time-consuming to read without such gimmicks. Would making them easier and snappier make the discussions better? I think the answer to that isn't merely "no", it's a resounding, obvious no. We need people to do more considering, not less.

> In the meantime, it's clear that "tl;dr" is there to signal something like "The Cliff's Notes Version". If it were a headline, the headline would be: "15 Easy Words You Should Read Right Now That Tell You All You Need To Know".

I disagree from observing the actual use. There's times when it is used for a comment that is nothing but a summary, or when it used (with or without other comment) for a hostile summary. Sure, those are bad, but they are bad independently of the use of the phrase "tl;dr" to signal a summary.

But much of the time its used on HN its used to either (a) distill the commenters understanding to contextualize the comments being made more clearly, or (b) to introduce a summary of the commenter's own detailed comment.

I don't think those are problematic. Yeah, the origin is dismissive. But the use on HN often isn't; the abbreviation "tl;dr" isn't the problem, and looking at it as if it was is looking past the real problem it is sometimes associated with.

Rather than saying "don't use tl;dr", it would be better to say "don't post just to summarize".

A substantial portion of the uses of tl;dr I've seen on HN are summaries of comments, not the article (and the most common, or close to it, is people using tl;dr to provide a short summary of their own in-depth comment.)

Its become a widely accepted online shorthand for "or, more succinctly, ...", so "don't use it on HN" is a pretty weird dictate. Yes, the etymology of the shorthand is a abbreviation for "Too long, didn't read", but except when its used alone, that's actually fairly distant from the meaning it has taken on in use.

Tldr: this guy doesn't like when people use tldr

Edit: oops didn't see he was a mod now his post makes more sense

More specifically: The guy that's currently running and in charge of Hacker News doesn't like tl;dr.

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