One thing you won’t find on this site is any TL;DR summaries. That’s by choice. I can see their value when browsing a site (like Reddit) where the culture is all about short-beat conversations. In that world, hitting a longer entry mid-scroll feels like hitting a bridge abutment on the Autobahn. But do we really want all our discourse to be reducible to the textual equivalent of a sound bite?
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In my opinion, letting the “tilder” (which is how I pronounce it in my head) infiltrate longer form sites does a disservice to everybody. If I can say what I’m trying to say in one sentence, I’ll do so, but if it can be conveyed that simply, chances are good I won’t bother saying it at all.
Much of what I write here isn’t really written for you guys anyway. Writing about an idea is how I figure out what I think about it. And thinking about things, to me, means grabbing a bunch of related threads, jamming them together, and watching to see how they all push and pull on the final weave. That kind of thought creature can’t be summarized in a sound bite without atrophying all the muscle it needed to live its life in the first place.
With the death of newspapers and magazines, where can we go when we want actual meat in our intellectual diet? We’ve still got books of course, but is there truly no middle ground between the 10-word summary and the 60,000-word treatise? In my opinion, that’s where blogs live and breathe.
So I’m going to nope on tilders. If visitors haven’t got time to read the whole thing, that’s fine, but I’m not going to contribute to dumbing down culture to keep them here. I think we have plenty of dumb already.