Recent years have seen a proliferation of large-scale discussion spaces on the internet. With increasing user participation, it is not uncommon to find discussion spaces with hundreds to thousands of messages/participants. This phenomenon can be observed on a wide variety of websites - news outlets, blogs, social media websites, community websites and support forums. While most of these discussion spaces are able to support small discussions, their effectiveness is greatly reduced as the discussions grow larger. Users participating in these discussions are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information presented, and the systems that support these conversations are lacking in functionality that lets users navigate to content of interest.

tldr is an application for navigating through large-scale online discussions. The application visualizes structures and patterns within ongoing conversations to let the user browse to content of most interest. In addition to visual overviews, it also incorporates features such as thread summarization, non-linear navigation, multi-dimensional filtering, and various other features that improve the experience of participating in large-discussions.

The current version of the application is functional for discussions on Reddit. This application will be released shortly. Until the application can be released, here is a video that presents many of the unique features built into the application. For best results, watch the video with HD turned on, or download a high-resolution version from Vimeo. More soon!

Here is a sample of patterns seen with the visualizations built into the application. Each of these visualizations present unique insight into the nature of the conversation, and help in discerning points of interest within a large conversation.

Narayan, Srikanth and Cheshire, Coye - "Not too long to read: The tldr Interface for Exploring and Navigating Large-Scale Discussion Spaces". To appear in The 43rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Persistent Conversations Track - Jan 2010

The name tldr was inspired by an internet slang commonly used in discussion spaces. In the context of discussion spaces, tldr stands for 'too long; didn't read'. A tldr version of a discussion indicates a summary for those who don't want to read the whole thing. In many ways, that is exactly what the application does as well, so it is quite a befitting moniker.

Here's the wiktionary entry on tldr.

tldr is a project by Srikanth Narayan, done as part of the masters program at the UC Berkeley School of Information, under the guidance of Prof. Coye Cheshire. The project was recognized with a Dr. James R Chen Award.

For more information, feel free to contact me.