tl;dr stated off as a way of saying "this is too long and therefore requires too much effort for me to read it." Then that gave rise to people accompanying long reads with a "tl;dr version," which is usually a one or two sentence summary. Now that the latter is common and understood people just write tl;dr and then follow it with the summary, with the understanding that those who are unwilling to read the full version will read that instead.

Like 'justinlardinois I just use "TL:DR summary" to mean a "short summary." I didn't mean it as derogatory, and it doesn't feel dissonant to me -- although given how you view it I can see why you do. And yes, I'm a native English speaker.

How do you see it as derogatory? I'm a native English speaker and have never thought of it that way. I didn't click the link, but did appreciate his short summary – and upvoted him for it. ;)

I also appreciated the summary; my question was just about the phrasing. In it's literal usage, it's saying that the article had nothing useful to say: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tldr.

That clearly wasn't the case here, so I was wondering why the author choose to use it. I realize that meaning has changed over time, but I was wondering what meaning he (and others) intend when it is used.

'tl;dr' is often a troll response to a long post that that someone has obviously spent a lot of time on. Bonus troll-points if the long post was in response to another troll.

Example:

poster1: only retards use vi, notepad rules

poster2: huge list of reasons why vi is better than notepad

poster1: lol tldr

I was quite peeved when I first saw a "tl;dr" comment concerning one of my blog posts. My thought was, and still is somewhat, "if you didn't read it, how can you say it was too long for what it needed to cover? Why do you feel the need to tell others that you have the attention span of a fly?"

We already have terms like "summary", "digest", and even "précis"; why create a new term imbued with snark?

> "'tl;dr' is often..."

But not always. You have to consider how it was used to tell whether it was meant with ill will, the term tl;dr on its own doesn't necessarily tell you enough.

> I don't understand what people mean when they use it today

By now, it often is used to be friendly. There's a subconscious acknowledgement that long words take people's time. The speaker can even be talking about his own work and tell everyone "tldr version: " at the top.

Google uses it a lot in their own docs: https://developers.google.com/s/results/?q=tldr

You can also choose to pronounce it "teal deer" and use images of a green deer animal to signify the same.

...

In some situations, if you want, you can say it to be mean.