Spoiler Alert! You have a right to remain unknowing till you’re ready
By: Maulashree Shanbhag
Tags: Pop Culture, Internet, Spoilers, Design, Interaction Design

This one is for all the nerds and fanchildren (fanpersons?) out there. Our news feeds and searches are literally filled with ongoing series, and the net is dark and full of spoilers! Unless you’re Doctor Strange and you actively seek out 14,000,605 potential spoilers — you’d agree with me if I said we need a spoiler filter right now.

As another strange Doc once said…

Please, Marty, no one should know too much about their own destiny

Let’s be honest — the series we fan over are literally a part of our destiny. We know we’re going to see them through to the end. And we want to do it the right way, enjoying the journey.

Spoilers are bad, mkay?

Just yesterday I was looking at my Google Now feed, and I literally averted my eyes in the nick of time to prevent being exposed to what happens in the season 4 finale of Rick and Morty. Although I’d watch it the first opportunity I get, things just don’t release at the same date across the world, amigo. Apart from my long-standing demand for world peace, the first step of which, of course, is releasing all new movies and shows across the world on the same day… here’s a more reasonable demand for a Spoiler Filter.

Okay, we don’t want spoilers. What about it?

Let’s get to the root of the problem. The archetypal fangirl/fanboy consumes a lot of content and searches the web for more and more obscure news and trivia about their favourite franchise. We keep telling ourselves “You know nothing, Jon Snow” and pausing briefly to take the feels, we head on to the next juicy bit of info the web has to offer. While this knowledge empowers our search engines to give us more of the stuff we’d get starry-eyed over, our feed is peppered with things we don’t want to see just yet — fandoms we are yet to be exposed to, news about two episodes down the line, or even general speculation about the unreleased. Search engines could avoid this painful experience by customising our results. I’m not suggesting discarding some results pre-emptively, of course. But instead, results containing spoilers just show up masked or hidden, similar to how mature content appears in our feed in some apps. These entries would need an additional interaction, a sort of confirmation before the ‘sensitive’ material is revealed.

To begin with, users can simply opt in for a Spoiler Filter function. This will not discard any search results, but just ‘mask’ any of them which could have a potential spoiler. Going further, users can self-report their fandoms (similar to picking your ‘interests’) which can be updated over time, while websites, too can up the game by declaring a “need to have watched till episode 8 to be able to enjoy this” sort of a thing.

Here goes… Going to create a fake spoiler, because I can’t consciously do this to you just to prove my point.

Pinky swear, this isn’t a spoiler. Although, just to be fair, don’t blame me if Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon end up going with this storyline afterall.

To what extent can we go with this?

Starting with simply identifying articles which deal with recent/near-future releases and franchises (perhaps coupled with the location data?), some search results could automatically be masked. Driving it further, given we’re fangirling/fanboying enough, linking up our Netflix and Disney Plus and all other accounts to our search feed could really streamline things. In an ideal world where this data didn’t have any other implications, we could find ourselves in a utopia where the search engine knew exactly which line of dialogue you haven’t seen yet, and would be considerate enough to not expose your virgin eyes to the spoilers ahead. An all-knowing search engine would be able to pick and choose my results just enough to tease and pique my curiosity without giving the plot away. Maybe with a mysterious Alex Kingston smile, declaring “Spoilers” or asking “Have we done Jim the Fish yet?”.

For now, though, I’m good with just a warning that tells me this content could be too much knowledge for my un-caught-up self. Just a feature which lets me enjoy a few moments of blessed ignorance which I can spend getting excited for the next episode or the next instalment of the saga, instead of cringing away from my news feed or internet searches wishing I hadn’t opened them just yet.