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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

Why are people TL;DRing a lot of posts recently? Surely on HN, the joy is in discovering the linked content themselves surely?

If you don't have time to read HN, and need TL:DRs then you should question why you are here in the first place.

Vote down if you like, I joined HN to get away from inane commentary and TL:DR nonsense that's so prevalent on other sites.

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I find tl;dr to be extremely useful to find out if the article is worth reading or not.

There is no joy in being fooled by a clickbaity title. Also, HN is not a novel book, therefore I do not feel spoiled. I always silently thank people that write tl;dr. They try to save my time.

Exactly. I would happily read about some working 8bit port of Linux, but this thing here is just useless gimmick, compared to what it claims to be.

I somewhat agree; TL;DR can seem dismissive and certainly discards most of the value of the actual article.

In this case I did it because the title made me wonder if this was the article I read years ago about implementing an ARM emulator for AVR to boot linux. I clicked through, confirmed it was, and that it was a 2012 article. I figured I'd leave the TL;DR as a shortcut for others to confirm they've already read it, not as a replacement of the article for those that haven't.

as much as tl;dr is increasingly irritating when used in this way, baiting downvotes is also not cool.

could you explain why is it irritating?

I'm not baiting down-votes. Far from it. Just voicing that TL;DR is annoying. There's a reason you can't have both text AND a url in a HN submission - it's to encourage people to actually visit the link.

Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment ... :(

> it's to encourage people to actually visit the link.

You read the links? I'm just here for the commenting. If the comments imply the article is good enough I'll read it.

(This effect used to be very strong on the Guardian's commentisfree site, where the top comments often contained valuable correction/context to the tritness of the article)

> Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment

I've seen that done a few times; it's useful if it's paywalled/adwalled/unusuable-crashy-javascript-walled.

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