I have grown to loathe tl;dr.
Look, if it’s too long for you to read, don’t read it. You don’t need to be snarky because someone took time to write more words than you care to absorb. You don’t need to take pride in the fact that you have the attention span and/or reading comprehension of a manic gnat (thank you, Twitter). You don’t need to snipe at them because you’re lazy. Just skip whatever they wrote. I do it all the time.
If you feel the need to respond without reading their full comment, then do so, but don’t admit to not reading it. If you aren’t sure whether they addressed your point in their comment because “tl;dr,” that’s your problem, not theirs.
As verbose as I can be, I’ve only been tl;dr-ed once, and that was long ago, on a blog I later stopped reading because the comment section is like a snakepit (a comparison I cringe to make, since I think snakepits are actually pretty fascinating; OTOH, I wouldn’t wade into the middle of one wearing flip-flops, and this was the psychological equivalent).
This week, I read a very long blog post about a painful situation in someone’s life. Some of the responses were also quite long, but the narratives were compelling. People were sharing experiences of rape and other violence, cyber-stalking, death threats, and PTSD. Most responses were compassionate and respectful, but then there were the “tl;dr”s. And those floored me. How dare you tell someone who is opening up about a traumatic event, to a bunch of strangers on the Internet no less, that her story is too long for you to bother reading? Don’t read it. But at least have the decency not to silence her further by scolding her for boring you.
Because “tl” is a criticism of the writer, not the reader. It says, “What you wrote is too long/ too rambling/ too complex/ too uninteresting to hold my attention. So I’m not going to read it. But I want to add my words to this conversation; I want to be heard.” In expecting others to read your words when you refuse to read theirs, you are saying that yours are more important than theirs, that you deserve to be heard — for no better reason, apparently, than that you can be brief, which in your case, “didn’t-read”er, probably stems from a lack of complexity and substance — where they do not.
Well, in my own tiny and perhaps meaningless way, I am resisting. I no longer read comments that begin with “tl;dr.” Anything those comments have to say is now “tl;dr” for me.
The Literary Gargoyle 