Too Long; didn’t read

Head over to Compass News (website / iOS / Android) and you’ll notice the appearance of a charming little button beneath every news story:

Please nobody tell our designer that I defaced his beautiful design with a hideous red arrow in MS paint

Tl;dr is a pretty widely used piece of internet shorthand — it literally means “too long; didn’t read” and it was basically used to denote a quick, one-line summary of a long post — on a forum or similar. You probably know all this. Sorry.

It took us quite a while to get to this point. It seemed a little bit like we were betraying our own principles. We’ve repeatedly waxed lyrical about how every piece of journalism on Compass is hand-selected to the point where we host only the best of the best. Every article an art piece etc etc etc.

But it’s an unfortunate fact that we kinda had to face: even if an article literally descends from heaven cradled by winged cherubs, there are going to be people out there who just don’t have the time to read it. Sometimes you just have too much to do. Sometimes your class starts in five minutes and you desperately need to sound clever. Sometimes you’ve been on your feet for fifteen hours and the idea of looking at 700 words on a screen seems about as wise as easing a delicate part of your body into a blender.

Sometimes, you just need a tl;dr.

Compass News — in app or website format — is now fully usable in under two minutes. That’s roughly how long it will take you to swipe through every one of our super-summarised breaking news stories, and read the TL;DRs on all the featured stories of the day. And yeah — we think you should come back later and read the articles in full. They’re great. They deserve your attention.

But we can now confidently say that if you spent those two minutes on Compass, the next person you talk to is going to think you’ve spent the most of your morning reading the entire contents of a news stand. Don’t worry, they don’t need to know any different. Be the person who — despite their challenging job, crowded social life, insane university timetable — magically seems to be clued-up on all the important events and opinions in the world, every day.

Unless, of course, the person you meet is another Compass News user. In that case it will just have to be your little secret.