Depends, can it hop pay walls? Wish Lemmy had a no pay wall linking policy or at least a warning system. If it can summarize articles behind pay walls it is my friend.
Do agree with OP though, wish it could be even more concise.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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