In the age of millennials and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder appearing to be the norm, not to mention normal lazy people, it’s no surprise that something like Twitter has become popular and that blogs that require a bit of reading have been on the decline. Ergo, the birth of tl;dr.
tl;dr This blog post is about my site using tl;dr, what it means, why I use it and how it can help you. I’ll try to keep it short (pun).
Internet memes are a must, they’re a great time waster and they’re summarizing our current culture, political points of views, fails and all that good (and bad) stuff. We all know by now that lolcat pictures have cause Saturday evenings for us home-stayers to become #caturday evenings. One of these memes have (mainly in my opinion thanks to Wikipedia) taken a somewhat more serious turn: tl;dr.
Journalists posted news pages, interviews, wiki articles, blogs, etc. They all have them near the top or the bottom. A quick paragraph summarizing the content of the page for those who might have an interest in the content but are too lazy or otherwise unable to read in full and just wish to ‘skim’ the page without scrolling. More bluntly: Fuck this shit, too longer.. I did not read that. This feedback has turned into the feedback authors received: “This was too long, didn’t read it.. lol”, and just like laughing out loud became lol, this got abbreviated into tl;dr. Which on its own is now part of these journalist news pages, blog posts, wiki pages, and such as a quick summary at the top.
My blog posts on my site are not short. They’re not about one particular thing, and I know some content is terrible to read through and others just not to your liking. But the site is for me, mainly. So, thank you for finding stuff you do like and reading it. To help you the reader I thought it would be nice to try and add some consistency to my articles. Quick intro, a tl;dr. Then some info and an opinion, and conclusion or something like that near the end. Near the top I think it’s important to show that there’s a bold block that is easy to spot and readers can jump to straight away. ‘Oh it is about this, interesting..’ or ‘Meh, not my thing’, and they can move on.
Too long; didn’t read (abbreviated tl;dr and tldr, bastardized Teal Deer) is a shorthand notation added by an editor indicating a passage appeared to be too long to invest the time to digest. Long used on the Internet,[2] it has birthed the wikilink TL;DR to indicate a cited passage is being protested. Wall of text is kindred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_read
Anyway, I hope this sort of explains what tl;dr means on my blog – I had a few questions about it.