How To Avoid Online Spoilers

It can be frustrating when you have not seen a movie or episode in a series yet, and suddenly there are spoilers that tell parts of the story. Or even everything. Here’s how to easily avoid them.

Definition of the spoiler:

Noun: spoiler; plural: spoilers

  1. A person who spoils anything.
  2. A description of an important development in the history of a television, movie or book series that may reduce surprise or suspense to someone who is consuming this content for the first time.

The temptation to tell the story of a movie, that television episode or a book is too big for many. It is certainly part of human nature. The problem is when this impulse spoils the experience of consumption of this yet to all the others.

This is something that has become a problem with the advent of social networks, which can amplify these small bits of information on a global scale and in real time.

But there are a few ways to reduce your chances of seeing your favorite episode of Game of Thrones, the story of the last Avengers movie, or the book you were waiting to read while surfing the Internet.

Let’s look at some ways to do this.

Close the keywords

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, shutting down some keywords is one thing you have to do to avoid spoilers. Build a list of phrases or words that can ruin the story, including things like character names and title and access Twitter settings.

On the ‘Notifications’ tab, click the gear and choose the ‘Mute words’ option. Here you can add words you do not want to see and a few more things like phrases, user names, emojis, and hashtags. You should note the use of uppercase and lowercase letters in the words you add.

Another trick is to silence words only for a specific period of time. By default, the muting is forever, but you can set a period of days or weeks for this lock.

If spoilers still continue, you can always block that account specifically.

If you are a Facebook user, the task is more complicated because the social network does not offer such sophisticated tools to deal with these situations. You can only put certain accounts or groups to “sleep” for some time. During this time you will not see any publication of these sources.

In Instagram, you can also mute publications, stories, and accounts. This social network also provides filtering tools for publications by specific keywords. But as with Facebook, you can not mute a specific keyword throughout your feed.

Extensions and applications

If you use a browser such as Chrome or Firefox, extensions are available that automatically block spoilers, both on mobile platforms and on computers.

Spoiler Protection 2.0: This extension is available for both Chrome and Firefox both mobile (Android and iOS) and for the computer versions. This extension blocks absolutely everything that has to do with a certain word. You can customize the various features, such as blocking videos and images. This is one of the most complete locking systems available to you.

Unspoiler: This extension is also available for Chrome and Firefox is not as effective as the previous one to block what you do not want to see. With Unspoiler all keywords are covered by a bar. This bar can be removed if you are in the mood to spoil yourself. You can also save a certain spoiler for later viewing.

Video Blocker: This extension is only available for Chrome and blocks any Youtube videos, channels and comments on the subject that you define.

Shut Up: This extension is available for Chrome, FireFox and Safari and was designed specifically to block what you do not want to see in comment boxes of websites and social networks.

Spoilers Blocker: This Android mobile app hides the keywords you specify by placing a bar above them.

Social Fixer: This extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and was specifically designed for use with Facebook social network. Allows you to block and hide all types of publications.

Avoid the places where spoilers are most likely to appear

This tip is common sense in its pure state. If you are not interested in receiving information about that episode of Game of Thrones without first seeing the episode avoid the sites where it will be most likely to appear, such as Reddit, sections of comments of sites, blogs on this subject and distrust those reviews that speak in ‘spoiler free’ in the title.

Youtube is also not a good idea, because suggestion algorithms do not distinguish between what you really want to see and things with spoilers of your favorite movie.

If you need help, have doubts or concerns, do not hesitate to leave a comment in the comment box below and we will try to help you as soon as possible!

Tarun Pandit: Tarun Pandit an entrepreneur and blogger by passion, created Tech Khiladi to help with people with Technical stuff.