On the 'tldr' reaction

Continuing the discussion from Codes of conduct - adoption of standards:

@wolftune I originally 'appreciate’d your (linked) post and reacted with ‘tldr’, which I hoped communicated something like, “I didn’t read this because it was long, but I appreciate that you included a tldr, which I read.” Later I removed the ‘tldr’ reaction since I actually did end up reading the whole thing :stuck_out_tongue:

No particular point to this post, it’s just musings on how I use this forum.

Meta to this topic: As the first post in the #feedback-support:meta category, I think this topic would fit just as well in #feedback-support:forum and remain unconvinced that this category needs to exist.

3 Appreciations

Personally I think it should be renamed simply “longread” as “Too Long, Didn’t Read” isn’t a great tag in general. It doesn’t work for taging you’re own post as you have read it yourself, it doesn’t for people who come back to read something later, and it’s tone is a bit judgemental.

I don’t think it’s that big of a deal though. I’d only recommend someone taking the time to change it in discourse if it’s easy to do.

1 Appreciation

It is easy to change, but the current framing is intended.

A few of the team members (notably @wolftune and myself) have a tendency to write extremely detailed point-by-point replies. Occasionally this is appropriate, but more often unnecessary and counterproductive: a detailed reply that nobody reads doesn’t get its point across very well.

The tldr reaction[1] is intended as a way to give what we anticipate will be a very common form of constructive criticism without clogging the thread with meta-discussion. If you can think of a different name that preserves that meaning (too-wordy example: please_shorten_or_include_a_tldr), I’d be totally open to changing it, since I agree tldr errs a little more on the side of snark than helpfulness.


  1. Another important note: these are reactions, not tags. You can't, for example, view all posts that have received a certain reaction, as far as I know. There is a separate feature for tagging, though I believe you can only tag topics, not posts, and we have discussed creating a tag like "long-form discussion". ↩︎

3 Appreciations

I agree that would be a good tag. Something like that or otherwise expressing that a post is a valuable but long essay…