IMO, "tl;dr" is a misnomer. Or at least, I don't value such a thing as an alternative to reading the post. There's no way that one line captures the whole article, it captures that one person's main takeaway. Rather than assuming that such a thing tells me everything I need to know, or thinking it can help me understand the nuänces of the discussion, I take it as one reader's executive summary which will help me decide whether to read the entire post.
In this case, I read it as "A good read if you want to know how/why/whether to use Emacs-23 as a distraction-free writing environment."
The post has other value, of course, and I wouldn't object if someone else were to write something like:
tl;dr: Emacs continues to evolve, e.g. It's now as good a tool for writers as Scrivener or dedicated distraction-free editors.
That would give me another reason to read the post if I wasn't persuaded by the first. Summaries (including the title, natch) provide some value that a simple upvote score does not capture.
I guess the question is whether it's a misnomer or not.
I find "Too Long Don't Read" to be a dismissive attitude that I don't want here on HN, so I almost always vote down such comments (yes, including the ancestor here). But I appreciate executive summaries, and frequently vote them up to encourage their creation even if I didn't find the article itself compelling.
I realize that "TL;DR" is "just an abbreviation", but parsimony encourages me to conclude that it still connotes the words that it abbreviates and represents an attitude I do not like. Perhaps I'm reading too much into word choice, but in the end, word choice is really what makes the comments here worth reading.
In this case, I read it as "A good read if you want to know how/why/whether to use Emacs-23 as a distraction-free writing environment."
The post has other value, of course, and I wouldn't object if someone else were to write something like:
tl;dr: Emacs continues to evolve, e.g. It's now as good a tool for writers as Scrivener or dedicated distraction-free editors.
That would give me another reason to read the post if I wasn't persuaded by the first. Summaries (including the title, natch) provide some value that a simple upvote score does not capture.