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".
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".