Why I downvote "tl;dr" comments on Hacker News

Another solution is an appendix, as a sort of purgatory for zombie passages. Or a short and long version of the same blog post - your own tl;dr.

Perhaps best is the idea of chapters: treat the first blog post as an introduction or introductory chapter (or even as an abstract thereof), and the cool sentences you think of - that in reality are expansions of the main point - can move to a chapter, where they become first-class citizens, being directly relevant to that chapter's own thesis. Each chapter is a blog-post (and named, and linked to, as such). If you don't yet have enough material for one of these chapters, leave it as a draft for a while (or publish it as a skeletal chapter).

Read over your com­po­si­tions, and where ever you meet with a pas­sage which you think is par­tic­u­larly fine, strike it out. aka kill your darlings

It makes a perfectly good acronym 25% longer than it needs to be.

First off to remind you that most people hardly read anything - either through lack of time, lack of attention span or just that they only read stuff they agree with. If you want to get a message across you need to meet the needs of these people too. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago in the work place.

Secondly - for those who do read - sometimes you start reading something and your eyes/brain glaze over. Rambling, unpolished prose etc. all do this to me. By the same token there are texts that you start reading - just to see what it is about and are compelled by the authors carefully constructed prose to read to the end.

And of course sometimes as a comment tl;dr is just funny....

You write well, you're interesting, and (for me, anyway) reading is an experience; I enjoy it. Sure, I'm learning things or being exposed to different ideas etc, but I also enjoy reading it. The shorter your writing, the less time I get to spend reading it.

Writing a long-winded blog post about a simple idea, which itself is about distilling ideas to their essence is too obvious, right?

I also found that if I ignore the eye-rolling and complaints of long-windedness, other people eventually get more comfortable speaking at length. And the end result tends to be better online conversations. I think the "blurb" culture where no one has time or interest to read more than 2 sentences at a pop is one that is really very socially rejecting. My opinion: If you don't actually want to engage in social intercourse, you are free to just read the articles and not click on "comments" here. I never can wrap my brain around the practice of joining a discussion group and then bashing people for talking. The "comments" are the discussion part of HN and are totally optional.