In the age of information overload, it’s hard to stay up-to-date on current events. There are so many headlines being lobbed at us from every news site but so little time to actually read the articles associated with them. Sometimes, the pieces we do click on outlast our attention span. Hence, the emergence of the acronym “TL;DR” (too long; didn’t read).
But Facebook has a plan for lazy news consumers. The social media behemoth is creating a tool that would eliminate reading altogether, offering up summaries instead. It’s called, unoriginally, “TL;DR.” It will digest the article for you and spit it out in bullet points.
News folks are not going to love this. Some product manager announced internally a tool that FB is developing called “TL;DR”. Basically, it will use AI to summarize long form articles and spit out bullet points so people don’t have to read the full piece.
What could go wrong!
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) December 15, 2020
What’s more, the tool would use audio narration of articles as well as a vocal assistant, of whom you could ask questions about the article. (Because if it’s too complicated for you to understand, surely a bot can fill in the blanks.)
Unsurprisingly, Twitter was not enthused.
Facebook is not journalism’s friend. Never was.
— Steve Lubetkin (@podcaststeve) December 16, 2020
Shortening Americans’ attention span one article at a time.
— Ex-Yaffer (@diane_a_nolan) December 16, 2020
rEaDiNg iS hArD
— Church of Baseball (@churchofbasebal) December 16, 2020
Look, unfortunately some people aren’t very curious or bright. Can we please not encourage those traits though?
— NoFines (@fines_no) December 16, 2020
It’s actually going to compress the content into memes to make stories easier to digest.
— Botty McBotface (@MrSnoofers) December 16, 2020
Summary of that tweet: FB is developing a new tool!
— JRehling (@JRehling) December 16, 2020
We get that people are busy, that we all have to pick and choose what we focus on when so many things are demanding our attention. But providing “news” so distilled it loses its context is like watching CNN on mute and just reading the headers. You’ll have a talking point, but you won’t know what you’re talking about.
The only way we would get on board with this TL;DR nonsense is if the so-called geniuses at Facebook developed yet another tool, one that detected if you were too lazy to read the article and therefore prevented you from posting an opinion about it.
Cover Photo: urbazon (Getty Images)
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