I have pretty extreme ADD, even on medication, and I could never hope to finish an article like this. I can never leisurely read; I have to skim. "tl;dr"s and commentary are what I thrive on, and ultimately how I derive a large percentage of my present context.

I'm not saying that I can't get deep into technical specs or literature, but when it comes to a form that is largely prose... forget about it. Breadth-first search takes over.

That's completely mistaken. Everyone has finite time, and we need a way to find out what's worth reading. HackerNews and the Internet in general is filled with unnecessarily bloated articles.

Folks have been using tldr's in the academic sphere for centuries; they're called 'abstracts'.