Common news is usually conveyed in little packages to begin with. Typically three to four sentences can sum up a news article or big story that just occurred. To implement a bot to find those three or four sentences just screams lazy considering most news articles don't go past two pages

You're saying here that it makes an already small article even smaller, I've explained how the bot now has much more harsh criteria when to post. The tl;dr must be between 450-700 character and be at least a 70% reduction from the original.

More detailed/complex subjects like science or philosophy don't benefit from a cliff notes style write up because the devil is in the details or nuances in a study or argument respectively.

I'll repeat a theory I've already mentioned in this thread. Imagine every single sentence of an article is ranked by importance with the most important on the top. Probably around 1/3 of the way down the list that 1/3 of the article is ~80% sufficient to describe the content. It's that 2/3 of text that deters people from contributing whilst providing only ~20% of the information needed to fully understand the article and what is going on in it. So it would be better to do without it from a purely statistical standpoint. This phenomenon might fluctuate between simple and complex topics, but here's how I know it's true. I can plug a long complex article into SMMRY and tell it to show me all the sentences it can instead of just 6, and then turn the heat map on which highlights most important in red and least important in yellow. I would scan through the yellow/light orange hue and virtually none of the sentences increased my understanding of the topic that the red didn't provide. It would consist of excessive examples, quotes that reinforce points that have already been made etc.

Sometimes you don't want a subject to be "more relevant" to the mainstream if all it brings about is dumbed down conversation. There are entire subreddits created out a want to escape the masses and their insatiable thirst for "x for dummies" comments and memes.

I'll respond with a few things I've lifted from my conversation with nascentt:

If the bot does have an effect of bringing in stupid people to a sophisticated subreddit (lots of exaggeration here, but good to display an example), then the stupids will still be a small minority, and the vast majority will simply downvote their potentially stupid comments and submissions. It would take an unrealistically huge amount of 'stupids' to reach that critical point where the original members wouldn't be able to combat them upvoting each other. It is also an assumption that the 'stupids' would contribute excessively to the subreddit, I actually think they would be a silent minority that mostly lurks and gets the gist of the content, because they will have gotten the point that "herpyderp" isn't a valuable contribution to a discussion and they would just loose karma. It's only after that that critical point has been reached that I think your theory is true, but that amount of traffic relocation is beyond the scope of this bot. The bot is aiming more for the crowd in the middle of the sophisticated and the stupids, those who skim the articles but would prefer to be efficient and have a bot to do the skimming for them.

The more important response though is that it won't send stupid people over like you think it will. There is a big disparity gap between comprehending "i like cats" and "Neuroscientists link brain-wave pattern to energy consumption - New model of neuro-electric activity could help scientists better understand quiescent brain states such as coma. ". Remember the bot doesn't change the wording of the sentences, it only removes stuff. It's not like it gives an ELI5 for every article, it offers readers to be efficient with their reading by putting the important key sentences and keywords on a silver platter. When I say it will make a subreddit more accessible, I'm talking about the layman or amateur scientist/politics-enthusiast etc who has been discouraged by excessively long articles but will now have a small ladder to reach the discussion.

I also think sulf's point about summaries academic is relevant to what your saying:

Here in academic world if you don't put an abstract (also known as summary or tl;dr) in your paper, nobody is going to bother to read it. There is a good reason why summaries exist - to let the reader know if he is interested enough to read the entire article, especially when there is too much information (other articles/papers demanding attention). There is a lot of (smug?) dislikes for tl;dr's in this thread, but you should consider that one man's "laziness" is another man's "no time to read everything". How else do you filter content? Upvotes are ok, but readers of the new queue also need something.

I think his point speaks for itself.

As for Reddit's "dependency" on external sites. Well, Reddit is a social news aggregate in theory. It's structure is purposely relying on external sources that are interesting to people.

Sure it is, but reddit's functionality is occasionally broken when a site goes down from the massive influx of traffic it sends. So at least there will be some context to those who are intrigued by the title and comments but can't access the content. This has happened to me several times aswell. Instead of everyone sitting in a circle waiting for each other to tell them what happened, the bot will have provided a tl;dr and an extended summary at a much broader (reach to more articles), faster and consistent rate than a redditor. This is not to discourage redditor's from providing info, which I encourage them to do parallel to the bot and improve on what the bot provided. Also on the point of long term archiving, as time goes on the likelihood of a submission getting broke increases. What are the chances that a submission to an article 5 years ago is still directing to a non-404 page? The risk certainly grows exponentially, so this is what I mean by reddit becoming more internally reliable. I'm not saying (you might have thought I meant this) that reddit should replace it's content from external to internal, I'm saying it should have an internal fallback system that exists in conjunction with the external site. The only thing that's detrimental about this is hard drive space (which is now incredibly cheap) so how can this be detrimental to reddit at all?

spoon feeding you information

You're talking as if it's mandatory, the option is there for those who prefer it. It doesn't replace the article, it mingles with the discussion where more context is usually desired.

An overuse of bots such as these cater to people's inclinations for convenience and end up providing no real insight or understanding,

If they didn't understand anything from the tl;dr or extended summary, they would downvote the bot and not comment "herpderp" with their skewed knowledge. I think my explanation of the drop off point of importance being at around the 1/3 or 1/2 mark responds to this point, which I explained earlier in this comment. People right now are skimming articles on reddit and posting sufficiently decent comments. If they don't and type herpderp, they get downvoted. This bot does the skimming for them, but convienience is sometimes not a bad thing. Next thing I'm gonna hear is that we should write paper letters to each other because email is "too convenient".

But before your bot, those that had curiosity in them still had to actually read the article before some random person posted a tl;dr of it on his own.

Now you're talking like reading the article is like homework and we "know whats best for you". If people didn't want to read it, they wouldn't. Now that a tl;dr is provided at a faster rate, people will give more attention to these sophisticated topics.

I appreciate your response, have an upvote sir.