Getting back to the central topic of the thread -- one's feeling obliged to share that a piece of writing is TL thus one DR -- I get the impression that far too many folks have determined that
a great many writings, not just mine, fall into that category for them. Obviously I understand the tacit sentiment of TL;DR: "I'm interested in the topic or what the writer may have to say, but I am unwilling to read it because it requires too much effort/time of me to do so." That's not an unusual or strange sentiment at all. I felt that way about quite a few books I've labored through:
- James Joyce -- Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
- William Faulkner -- The Sound and the Fury
- Gabriel García Márquez -- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- John Milton -- Paradise Lost
- Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
- George Eliot -- Silas Marner
- Edmund Spenser -- The Faerie Queene
- Herman Melville -- Moby Dick
- Several other of the Great Books -- IMO, quite a few of them while great for the ideas they contain are not at all that great to actually read.
Of those books and quite a few others, I can say only that it was a good thing I had to read them for a class and a grade. True, that's slightly different from being entirely unwilling to have read them; I was willing to read them, but only because I was unwilling to be given a low mark when the time came to discuss them. Here, that impetus clearly doesn't exist.
What I think is going on here is that folks have an assumption about what other members post. That assumption is that the writer aims to be "consumed" by everyone here. That may be so for some writers here, but it's not at all true for me. I'm well aware that what I write will not appeal to everyone. My writing isn't even intended to appeal to everyone. What is my target audience? Those folks who care enough about the topic to consider it and respond to it with a comparable level of completeness, introspection, and analytical rigor. I know that's not likely going to be "everyone" or even many people. Indeed, I'd just as soon folks who aren't in the target audience not read my long posts. That works out best for them and me, especially insofar as we don't know each other thus there's no tangibly personal connection between us.
While it's nice to have more readers than less, that's something I care about with regard to the business white papers I submit for various conventions and lectures. I know quite well who comprise the audience; moreover, I'm not choosing the audience I want to reach with those documents. The audience is predefined and I write specifically for its members. But here's the thing nobody has ever reached out to me and of a paper I wrote shared with me that the paper was too long thus they didn't read it. In fact, nobody's ever bothered to tell me they didn't read the paper, regardless of what they thought about a paper's length.
Here, the audience consists of pretty much anyone who can access the site. Accordingly, I am free to choose what subset of that vast audience I care to target. I'm not required to write for everyone; thus I don't. As a writer, I'm not alone in that regard. For example, Richard Feynman wrote
QED with a broad target audience in mind, the point being to make quantum mechanics accessible to non-physicists; however, his "The Theory of a General Quantum System Interacting with a Linear Dissipative System" (QLDSI) is written for physicists. Can non-physicists read "QLDSI?" Of course they can, but unless they happened to have been his children or close friends, they were sorely mistaken to presume Feynman would have suffered their remarks that lacked a comparable level of comprehension and completeness.
So you see, I created this thread not to express any sentiment of my own about whether folks read or don't read my post, but rather to obtain input on what drives others to abstain from reading something and then tell the author they didn't read it. In the digital world, folks manage to not read all sorts of things and they go on with their life, never sharing that they didn't read the document. What is different about public forums, this forum, that folks don't do the same?
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