There was more of a time penalty for clicking to different pages, now it doesn't matter if you "waste" page loads

Quite the contrary, we didn't like waiting for image-heavy sites to load.

Remember all the text that used to be in 1980's magazine ads?

That led me to ask “when did tl;dr get coined?” and it seems likely after 1999.

https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how... claims early 2000s

Really?! I'm actually kinda surprised, I would have guessed it's a much more recent abbreviation than that. I think I only started seeing it around 2010 or so.

"tl;dr" was around when I hung out on LiveJournal, so definitely pre-2010. This would have been around '01-'06.

Anecdotally I remember first encountering it on the Something Awful forums. I always assumed it originated there (like lots of stuff did in the early 2000s).