TLDR: the best content is short content
People have short attention spans. If information cannot be condensed into a 280 character tweet or a TikTok then many people aren’t interested in taking the time to read or watch the content.
Some people do not have the time to read a long-form article that will take at least an hour or to watch a video that will take two or more hours of their time; but Isaac Morehouse and Aaron Russell have created a solution to that problem, an app called TLDR.
What’s TLDR?
TLDR is a new platform that allows anyone to request or create short summaries of any piece of content and gives them the opportunity to receive BSV for their contribution to the platform.
TLDR stands for ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’ and typically prefaces a short summary of a long piece of content.
At the moment, individuals can go to TLDR and create TLDR’s for video content as well as pay to view all of the TLDRs under a specific video. After paying to read TLDR’s, platform users can vote on the submissions they believe are the best. The top 3 summaries get a percent of the payment every time someone clicks to purchase TLDRs for a piece of content. The top-voted submission receives 60% of each payment, and the 2nd and 3rd ranked submissions (if present) receive 10% each–TLDR takes the remaining percentage.
Why TLDR?
What inspired the creation of TLDR was an individual who came to Chronos Labs with the idea.
“The main economic influence was George Gilder. The theoretical underpinning is the Information Theory of Money, “Money is time”, the value of the summarizer’s time is pitted against the value of the reader’s time. The reader wants to ascertain whether a specific content piece is worth his time. Competition on the best summary, then ensures that the best summary is rewarded and brought to the surface,” said the individual who wished to remain anonymous.
“With so much content (good and bad) vying for our attention, we believe that every tool that can help us determine which content is worth our attention, is a useful tool.”
Shortly afterward, the Chronos Labs team got to work on making it a reality.
“Aaron Russell (well known in the BSV developer community as “Libs“) and I started working on some projects together, and a friend of his came to us with this idea of a plugin that lets you see or request short summaries of content on any website for a small fee. We batted it around a bit and started to see a lot of potential,” said Morehouse.
“Of course any kind of consumer platform that relies on user-generated content and scale is a huge risk, but we thought there was something to it and we (and by we I mean Aaron entirely) could spin up a working beta pretty quickly and see. The more we played around with the idea, the more we liked it.”
The Chronos Labs team launched the platform by pulling the RSS feed from the CoinGeek YouTube channel as a way to get content onto the site without user-generated requests. However, the team has plans to add a feature that allows platform users to request TLDRs for any type of content on the web.
“I’d say give us 30 days and you should see the request feature,” said Morehouse.
“We want to build an app that is useful to millions of people and potentially so useful it gets them to become users of BSV. Strategically, we want to first prove that the app can create value for BSV users and dial in the form and function. Then try to expand the user base.
As far as content, we started just pulling a single content feed – the CoinGeek YouTube channel – mostly just to get something live and make sure everything works. The CoinGeek conference had just happened and we thought it would provide a good trial run. We are eager to expand to all kinds of content beyond just BSV in the coming months.”
The value of a good review
A good summary has the potential to generate more interest and drive more traffic to a piece of content. If an onlooker is not sure whether or not they would want to invest their precious time into an article or video, a short yet powerful TLDR of the content has the potential to sway them.
“A good TLDR should generate more views/reads of a piece of content, as someone on the fence about investing more time might be convinced by seeing what’s to gain. It’s potentially a form of advertising or distribution for content in the same way book reviews can be. Content creators can even create summaries of their own content to provide a bite-sized version for those in a hurry and earn new eyeballs and revenue,” said Morehouse in the blog post announcing TLDR.
“Good summarizers have a chance to make a name for themselves as well! A reputation of high-quality content summaries can accrue, and positions atop the leaderboard for several pieces of content will keep paying dividends.”
What next for TLDR?
When I asked Isaac Morehouse what we can expect to see out of TLDR in the near and far future he said,
“Near term is to have a place where those in the BSV community can pop by every day to read and write summaries of their favorite content. In the future, we’d love to be integrated across the entire web, from browser plugins where people can keep a queue of stuff they want summarized, to people making a living summarizing content, to widgets embedded on sites showing top summaries. We want to leverage the power of micropayments to get both the scale of open crowdsourcing and the quality of paywalls in a single package. We think there’s a big opportunity to create a new category of content as well – quality, bite-sized, non-marketing summaries of long-form.”
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