Also seen as tl;dr, it means “too long, didn’t read” and is applied to posts/articles/comments that stretch on to a point where people grow bored and stop reading. Or maybe they looked at the length ahead of time and skipped over it.
Unfortunately, the internet has greatly decreased attention spans. I mean, look at Twitter. It’s made for self-contained 140 character posts. Have a random thought? People will read it if it fits on their iPhone screen.
I’m not getting into whether the decay of attention this is a good or bad thing. You can make arguments either way (You don’t take time to analyze the substance! You have to learn to evaluate quickly!). Things like this are shifts in society as a whole. You can’t alter it without making significant changes to the internet.
It’s happening and ignoring it won’t make it go away. With so much information available, in fact bombarding people from all sides, if you’re not direct and to the point, people will file you under tl;dr. Granted there are other factors, such as readability and the subject’s interest, but those are posts for another day.
What do you think about long articles/posts? Good or bad? Maybe a dying art?
