Submitted by twovests in just_post (edited )

tldr: Use short summaries on your posts. It gets your point across better. Also, nobody will need to ChatGPT it.

I like to put a "TLDR" on most posts, emails, and other docs I write.

I think a nice thing about short-form posts like Twitter, Mastodon, BlueSky, etc. is that they necessarily lack nuance. A 300 character statement is inherently different when it comes inside a 300-character-limit box than when it comes inside a 60,000-character-limit box.

When you put a TLDR in the start, it has the added benefit of getting your central thesis out. It contextualizes the whole post. This post you're reading is different because of the tldr above.

This is a practice I've employed professionally ever since I could remember, but I recently had the displeasure and horror of seeing someone copy a README.md into GitHub's LLM to get a summary.
(The slop summary was, unsurprisingly, unable to emphasize what really mattered.)

Now, my README's already have a summary, so no such thing is necessary. In fact, I usually make each section title a statement, and add a tldr to each section. For long documents with long TLDRs, I even include a TLDR TLDR. You can summarize anything any amount of times and nobody can stop you.

It also helps because... Well, I'm not good at writing. My rhetoric is often circuitous and my elaborations unnecessary. But then I have the urge to over-edit, go back, cut too much. Is brevity wit, or is brevity the soul of wit? Fuck!

A "tldr" section allows me to write unhampered by the urge to over-edit, and it allows you to understand my post without having to read the part where I reference Hamlet.

In short, consider adding summaries to your posts today! Look, I even added two!

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