Too long, didn't read (or tldr) is proof that the internet is being overrun by stupid people.

Anyone who has been a part of an online forum has likely seen the acronym "tldr". Usually found following someone who posts a lot of lines, often with poor formatting and lacking coherent thought. It is usually identified in its first one or two lines as a rant and is largely ignored. This can be on a gaming forum, on a forum about hamburgers, or on one of the many popular Sailor Moon Cosplay forums of which I am a member and submit daily pictures of my adventures in life dressed up like Sailor Jupiter.

tldr, once upon a time, was something that fellow forumers used to alert a poster that his post was nonsense. It was a suggestion to reformat with paragraphs, punctuation, proper capitalization, and perhaps rethink their statements. It could often be interchanged with "wall of text" which meant more or less the same thing, though wall of text was usually reserved for someone with a good idea but poor formatting.

But in the age of the internet it seems that we have settled for communities full of children, pedophiles, potheads, and highschool dropouts. While there may likely be some intelligent folks lurking in those forums, they are often lost amidst a sea of stupidity. Intelligent posts often get little to no notice because of the various forum personalities and the type of threads they gravitate to. An intelligent post is usually immune to most forms of "trolling", another activity employed by morons. Though I do admit there are intelligent forms of trolling, it's often difficult to track down an intelligent troll and most fall into the same basic category.

But back to tldr. When a post would fill up an entire browser window with garbage it was not uncommon to see that phrase uttered one or two posts later. Browser windows were 1024 x 768 or even the older 800 x 600, and so text space was valuble. The more you filled the more important your words should be otherwise they're not worth most people's time. Add to that the fact that many people were still on dialup and if someone posted a three page epic about their cat's testicles the page would take forever to load due to an overwhelming number of advertisements and additional advertisements suggesting you could remove the advertisements if you paid $5 per month to the website.

But nowadays you have people who refuse to read more than 3 or 4 full lines. Forums have become more like a chat room, where people post repeatedely and in many threads in attempts to improve their post count and attain a slightly higher name title than other people. This leads to posts such as "/signed" when someone agrees or simply quoting someone else's post and adding a handful of words to it. People who write too much in one post are taunted by people who post 3-4 characters.

On many forums the idea of shortposting has been battled by imposing a 10 character minimum on all forum posts. This is faulty, however, as people immediately began typing "10char" after "lol" to reach their 10 character limit. It seems that no matter what you do, stupid people with no real opinions are going to garbage up your forums.

I keep getting sidetracked which is easy at 9:30AM when I'm barely awake. People who quote+lol or tldr or walloftext today seem to be either too lazy or too incompetent to post anything meaningful. So why take part in the forum community? I generally don't take part in any community just as an observer. While I may not post every day, I do try and ensure that each of my posts have some substance. I feel that I'm not only wasting my own time but the time of other people who might read my garbage if I were to post it. From time to time maybe I'll post something in the hopes of causing laughter but other than that I usually try to post something that matters.

My posts on forums generaly avoid the tldr claims because I rarely give those people the fuel they need to start a fight. I punctuate (often too much) and capitalize. I make paragraphs (probably too many) and I try to keep my ideas separate so people can understand me better. But I see it in countless other threads, some of which make sense and others are five lines and therefore too long for these people to read. But why? What is it about 5 lines that chases you away?

Most people today are using 1440x900 or 1920x1080 resolutions. 1600x1200 if you're still using a 4:3 monitor. Even those on 1024x768 still have plenty of text room with the way pages look today. Why is 5 lines so much trouble to read? Why has the internet, a world which began with just words, become a place where words are feared?

I think this comes back to an issue of bad parenting. Wow, where did that come from?!

When I was younger my mother gave each of her children a specifically allocated time on the computer to use the internet each day. Approximately one hour of each day was spent on the internet and that was all we had. The rest of our day was school, work, or homework. She believed that spending too much time on the internet would make us stupid or forget how to function in the real world. It wasn't until I was 20 and bought my own computer that I was able to really start using the internet far more than I should have.

In my case I used it to research and learn things that I didn't know before. History, news, art, all sorts of interesting topics that I could use to expand my horizons. When I was 21 I began playing MMOs but I never stopped using the internet to learn. Even today, while on holiday and not working (side note: being a teacher is awesome - long holidays), I spend several hours every day online but most of that is not sitting in a game. Two news sites are at the top of my most visited pages as well as Wikipedia in number three. 4, 5, and 6 are forums of which I am a member.

Bad parenting. Many children get on the computer after school and stay on the computer for hours. We've all met the 13 year old kid who screeches into voice chat in games and plays every day for 8 hours. Sure he's good at Counterstrike, but what about his homework? What about learning fundamental life skills that you're supposed to learn as a teenager? No, his parents are happy letting him play CS for 8 hours a day while they are off doing what bad parents do.

I am glad my mother was afraid of everything when I was a kid. She wouldn't let me play Nintendo with volume because she believed there were subliminal messages which would tell me to do bad things. She severely limited my access to the internet, and would only let me play video games on weekends. I might be batshit insane and I think My Little Pony is great (my first 8 years were with sisters and a single mom) but at least I'm not an idiot.

I will take these lessons and improve upon them with my own children. Video games may not be a weekend activity but they will certainly be a restricted activity. Internet access will be for the purpose of learning primarily, with recreation being secondary. My child will probably resent me for it at the time, like I resented my mother at the time. Of course I wanted to play Final Fantasy II every day for 8 hours and it was because of my mother that I couldn't. But today I look back and I see that it was the right thing to do. I know how my child will think when I tell them they can't play Final Fantasy XXIV for 8 hours but I hope that, like me, they will also realize when they're 28 and the internet has gotten even more stupid that I was protecting them.

tldr version: tldr is stupid - read the whole thing you lazy morons.