Stealing TL:DR from Reddit 12.29.10 1
by Sean Blanda in Experiments

Here at Technically Media, we’re big fans of the way social news site Reddit has built a huge community by listening to their audience, keeping things simple and practical.

The Reddit community, like most online communities, has its own customs and etiquette and one of our favorites is the practice of placing “TL:DR” an at the end of a long post to sum up in a sentence or two what was written.

TL:DR or “Too Long: Didn’t Read” isn’t exclusive to Reddit: years ago CNN began putting “story highlights” (example) in its stories. We think it’s time that more news outlets acknowledge that most people wont read every word of a blog post or story. No website is ever going to change someone’s reading behavior. Instead, all we can do is accommodate the skimmers.

The brevity of TL:DR got us thinking of another medium known for keeping things simple: Twitter. So we’re trying something out here on the TM blog. At the bottom of every story is a “TL:DR” for people who prefer to skim stories before diving in. Next to the TL:DR we provided a link that will automatically insert that TL:DR into a Tweet if you care to share the story.

Because, honestly, you should enjoy content the way you want.