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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

It's important for HN to keep its distance from tldr culture. Longer articles are ok, even if many of us won't read them. It's true of any post that most people won't read it.

Snap summaries make for reflexive reactions. That's the shallow kind of discussion we're hoping to avoid here. What we want in comments is reflection, which is slower, takes more energy, and leads to more considered exchanges.

More on the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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Scientific papers aim for a similar objective. They also recognize the importance of being able to summarize. Abstracts are a good idea, and don't necessarily mean people will make snap judgments.

There's a lot of long rubbish on the Internet. Being able to quickly distinguish it from good stuff is essential to using your time sensibly.

The problem isn't summarizing or recommending or condensing submissions. Most comments do some or all of those things.

The problem is tl;dr culture, which actively encourages people not to read the story, and, worse, to discuss the story without having read it.

This is so easy: you can almost entirely avoid the issue simply by avoiding the term "tldr".

The abstracts are often written by the people who wrote the paper, a tldr often isn't, this allows at best inaccuracies in the summation and at worst complete bias which then results in a big argument completely unrelated to the source material.

Frankly if you aren't willing to read the content you simply shouldn't comment on it until you have.

HN is not just for commenting, it is also for reading other people's submissions and comments. So, granted, it's better not to write comments without reading the article first, but why should that mean that people who have read the article should not write a summary?

None of this is relevant. Summaries are not substitutes for the content. They're to indicate if the content is relevant or not.

Frankly, if you aren't capable of summarizing the content, any other comment you'd make is probably rubbish.

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