Favourite Philosopher TL;DR

Since at least 2003, TL;DR which means “Too Long; Didn’t Read” has been used as a reply to a much longer post on a message board or other places to indicate that the replying user didn’t bother to read the comment because it was too long (which is probably pretty self-evident.)

On Reddit, they tend to use a slight variation.  There, TL;DR is commonly used pre-emptively by the person making a long comment by adding a brief comment at the end of the post that summarizes what has been said for anyone without time (or just too lazy) to read the whole post.

A recent Reddit thread used this convention to great effect by asking Redditors to submit the TL;DR version of their favourite philosophers, getting responses about everyone from Plato to Camus to Captain Picard and Homer Simpson or this top-rated comment which is a grab bag of all the big names.

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