If you care about spoilers, why are you still here reading? (Destiny)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Sunday, September 03, 2017, 22:44 (2725 days ago) @ Funkmon

You want to inhibit my conversation with my friends about the biggest cultural phenomenon of that summer, because YOU want to watch it on DVD?!

I mean, it's not like they're intruding on your private conversation. Is it? It's a public forum. It works differently than just talking to your friends in private!

All moderation and general rules of decorum are inhibiting conversation, but it's the whole tradeoff for being able to have a, well, moderated forum. If you don't think people should care about spoilers, that's one thing. They do anyways, though.

Now, I'm not telling you not to talk about it, and I'm not splitting hairs about whatever spoiler you want to do. But if you want to go out and talk about a plot spoiler, you can do that, without infringing on others' ability to remain unspoilered! Click the freaking spoiler button on the side, [spoiler]manually type in spoiler tags,[/spoiler] or hell, just say "Hey I'm going to spoil [WHATEVER] after this fair warning" at like, negligible cost to you or your friends' ability to communicate.

It's like people already came up with solutions to this problem, or something!

I'm not going to argue about whether people are too touchy about spoilers, or if the media culture's played their expectations, or whatever. Because I don't personally care? I just don't want to see people get upset by a problem that easily doesn't have to be a problem, even if it might be kind of a stupid problem to begin with.

(Statistically, people might enjoy things more when they're spoiled, but that isn't a hard and fast rule; it's a trend, a general statement, and so you can't really use it to dismiss any given individual grievance because you don't know that it isn't an exception or outlier. So it just seems kind of vacuous to bring up because you can never know how you'll enjoy something without spoilers after you're spoiled, but you can always just, watch/play/read/listen-to it again to get that spoiled experience. Kinda.)

Not gonna touch the stuff about the amount of game information that's considered spoilers, because I can see both sides there and my only real position is that everyone should abide by the standard decided by the community and the rules, not their own personal opinion on what is a spoiler and what isn't, with an err to the side of 'this is spoilers', just because it saves some grievance, y'know?

And really, trying to fight the battle of what people should be bothered by under some standard of reason is just a lost cause. I'm not endorsing the culture of "I was offended by something you said, you are automatically terrible whatever you intended" but eventually you're going to just have to accommodate other people, at least when there's no actual moral stake on the line.

Though feel free to keep talking about it, of course. Looking over this it's coming off kind of funky but it's a bit too late for me to put together a great rewrite, so, yeah I'm just going to slap on a "I'm not trying to sound like an ass" sticker here and hope it's not actually necessary.