I don't agree with the Douglas's interpreting an author's own writing of a TL;DR as answering the question of whether the author himself read it -- rather, it i

I don't agree with the Douglas's interpreting an author's own writing of a TL;DR as answering the question of whether the author himself read it -- rather, it is pre-empting the question that might be asked by readers. While it is true that it is entirely possible (and common practice) to provide the content of a TL;DR in the first sentence, it might not always be there. The reader can only know if the first sentence was a summary by first reading it (see the Halting Problem). TL;DR is an elegant solution to this problem because it only requires five (minimally four) characters to be read to identify the summarizing statement, and then consume its content. And with the immense amount of content begging for my attention on the Internet, I for one appreciate being able to quickly determine if reading the article in question is something I will likely want to do. TL;DR: TL;DR != opening sentence