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Ask HN: How do you feel about TL;DRs on Hacker News?

5 points by teach ↗ HN
I've been on Hacker News a very long time. Recently I have noticed that many posts have a "TL;DR" comment giving a brief summary of the linked article.

These TL;DR comments bother me tremendously, but I can't quite articulate why. I feel like maybe it bugs me that someone takes the time to post an interesting article and a comment with nothing more than a summary implies that the article is not worth reading.

I even looked in the guidelines for comments to see if it's discouraged, but didn't find anything.

I realize that communities grow and change over time, so maybe my opinion is uncommon. What do you think?

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 16.6 ms ] thread
AnimalMuppet
Sometimes I (and others) give a TL;DR to our own posts. It's saying, "If you're not going to take one or two minutes to read this wall of text that I wrote, here's the short version."

Scientific papers have abstracts. Business and government papers have executive summaries. This is not an unusual thing. So I ask: Is it the practice that bothers you, or the label we use to signal it?

teach
The _practice_ does not bother me at all. I'm a big fan of abstracts, executive summaries, top highlights and posting TL;DRs of your own work. I do it all the time for my own writing and think it's just good practice.

What bothers me is when person A posts a link and person B comments with nothing but a summary.

qwerty456127
To be honest, I feel profound gratitude to the TL/DR comment author who cared to read the article and write the summary for me. And sort of annoyance towards the original article author. I believe everybody MUST learn to write good TLDRs/abstracts/conclusion/summaries for their own articles or GTFO. "Someone takes the time to post an interesting article"? How do you know it's interesting before you read it? How do you feel once you waste time to read a multi-page article just to realize the valuable knowledge you have acquired actually fits in a twit? Those who find themselves actually interested in the details and everything else can go on and read them, those who don't should not be forced. If you care about your propagating ideas - take care to write a TL/DR.