Longform articles can be a great way to do a deep dive on a particular topic. That said, sometimes you don’t have the ability (or perhaps the desire) to read through a 5000-word article on a topic right this second, but you still want to get the gist of what is said, that’s where TLDR can come in.
TLDR (which stands for Too Long, Didn’t Read), summarises long articles that are too long for you to read, so you don’t have to read them. The site automatically summarises any article, text, document, webpage, or essay by either inputting a website’s URL or copy/pasting the text from an article into the site.
Based on our tests, the longer the article the better the site tends to work. While it can certainly summarise the shorter stuff (like this post, for instance), the highlights it pulls out aren’t quite as accurate as what it’s able to accomplish with longer form work. It also tends to work better with longer news articles than narrative essays and the like. For instance, the tools summary of this article in Outside about a murder in the Moroccan Mountains manages to not mention murder at all in its summary.
However, the site’s summary on this Daily Beast article on the El Paso shooter was pretty spot-on.
Obviously, it’s not a full-on replacement for actually reading an entire article, but it can help you get the idea of what something longer is about before deciding to add it to your to-read list.
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