The reason I want summaries is so that I can decide whether to invest time in reading the whole thing. This may seem insulting to the writer, but sorry, I'm inundated with articles asking me to read them. If they don't begin with some kind of summary of what the point is and why it's important, I just move on.
There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading.
I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse.
Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.
There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading.
I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse.
Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.