• @[email protected]
    92•10 months ago

    Ok, if an article is 500 words long and the bot shortens it to 80 is still reasonable to call it TL:DR, however if there is a 1000+ word article we have two options:

    Shorten it to 2-300 words and still give us most of the important details, or give us a two sentence summary, which is the true TL:DR for me, but most headlines also do the same job.

    Personally option 1 is much better and I don’t care how the bot is called. I’m okay with reading one phone screen worth of text instead of clicking the link and skimming through whatever side content and ads they have and reading 5-10 times as much.

    Call it something else if you don’t like the TL:DR bot name, or block it, but it’s super useful IMO.

  • @[email protected]
    66•10 months ago

    Here it does a great job of reducing a text of 174 words to 172 words. 👍

    (I do not want to complain too much. Usually it works and it is short enough for me to quickly read it.)

    • @[email protected]
      50•10 months ago

      Best of all you do not need to click the link, load the website, enable JavaScript because there is nothing without it and then tap the cookie banner away disabling all of the cookies first.

      • rivvvver
        31•10 months ago

        i see a future where we no longer access websites directly because websites got so bloated that using a bot to give us the content instead is just way easier

      • r00ty
        6•10 months ago

        And don’t get me started on “legitimate interest” cookies. Legitimate to whom?

      • @[email protected]
        2•10 months ago

        Actually you usually need to have Javascript off, 90% of news websites paywalls are just Javascript so turning it off let’s you read the article.

  • janAkaliEnglish
    12•10 months ago

    We need a better tldr bot and also a tsdfln (too short doesn’t feel like a novel) bot.

  • @[email protected]
    10•10 months ago

    This. I mentioned this a couple of times, IMO a Tl;DR shouldn’t exceed 150 words, but the bot’s author disagreed with me. It’s not a TL;DR if it takes up half the screen.

    • @[email protected]
      20•10 months ago

      You can get a shorter TLDR by scimming it But having to load some bloated article with pop ups and autoplay videos is worse So I would rather have a long TLDR than it being too short

      People really want TLDR bot to effectively give clickbait titles with no context

      • @[email protected]
        4•10 months ago

        I was seeking information on deer salt licks the other day and clicked on one of the search results that took me to someone’s hunting site. The site had every auto play video and pop up you could imagine. It’s like they used every shitty trick in the book to have you click an ad or video. On mobile those tiny “x”s to close them are more difficult to hit, so it was quite tricky to navigate. Ultimately the page told me very little in a ton of words. Ug. Great example of that bloat.

    • @[email protected]
      1•10 months ago

      To be fair, a 1k word article can be TL;DR’d to < 150 words much easier than one with 30k words.

  • Thomas Douwes
    6•10 months ago

    The bot uses smmry.com to make its summaries, it would be easy to make a fork that lowered the amount of sentences in the summary, but it might lose some important details.

    EDIT: oops, completely wrong bot, I was looking at another lemmy TL;DR bot on github

    EDIT2: should still be quite simple to fork the current one, but I couldn’t find where to reduce the number of sentences

  • Uvine_Umarylis
    2•10 months ago

    Honestly I just read the TL;DR bot in lieu of the article itself so I don’t have to think about paywall & such