@ Adrian:

Damn… Didn’t think of that. That’s a really good one too. :)

Why don’t you get an Italian domain? Dontspoil.it

Mitlik wrote:

But you wouldn’t walk up to your friend and blurt “Can you believe Mr. Y did thing X?!” You would probe first, to make sure they had seen it.

Well, I think there is a little bit of a difference here. Social media is more like a water cooler type discussion. So I view the scenario more along the lines of this:

You and few of your work buddies are standing in the lunch room getting coffee and discuss latest episode of, say, Game of Thrones. Suddenly another coworker appears in the lunch room and proceeds to get coffee.

You continue your conversation, and the newly arrived person inches in to listen to what you are saying… He even chuckles a bit when you make a joke about something on the show. Then someone says something about the latest plot twist and the new guy looses his shit. He throws the coffee cup on the ground, says mean things about your mothers and storms out of the room.

I guess my point is that Facebook and Twitter feeds are not actively piped into your neural cortex (yet) so they require a little bit of active participation. And yes, I do agree that you should exercise at least some common courtesy and try not to tweet blatant spoilers outright. I did get in trouble however for tweeting very vague things like “OMG, Carl is such a badass now!” or posting a spoilish reply in the Facebook comments (which I always assumed was OK since you usually have to expand the post to see all the comments anyway, and comments do not show up on timelines).

You would think that people would be smart enough to avoid show related FB threads if they haven’t seen the latest episode, and maybe be careful scanning their feed the night the show airs.

Sunday night I missed the 9pm EST showing of Game of Thrones. Did I get spoiled? Nope. I simply avoided /r/GameOfThrones and stayed off of Twitter and FB till 11pm when I was finally able to watch it. Same goes for Bioshock Infinite – I picked it up weeks after it came out, but I knew nothing about the plot. I was actually surprised the “hanging” scene from the TV commercials was not in the final game.

But yeah, I get it. I understand the issue, which is why I’m always mindful of spoilers here on this site. And that’s why I created the service. :)

Full disclosure: I believe that the statute of limitations on spoilers never expires.

You know what really grinds my gears? Folks who complain about TV spoilers in social media… several hours, or even days after the original air date of the episode…

Luke, I never would have imagined you taking this stance. I would expect you to understand that, with the advantages of asynchronous communication and changes in video story distribution would mean, the etiquette surrounding the discussion of stories would need to evolve. I agree that consuming stories is a social experience. But you wouldn’t walk up to your friend and blurt “Can you believe Mr. Y did thing X?!” You would probe first, to make sure they had seen it. Why would you be any less courteous on social media?

I love the underlying idea here, maintaining the spoiler shield is a commendable endeavor. Though I am sorry you were whined at enough to do something about it.

@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, I was kinda bummed out when I found out that spoil.me and dontspoil.me were already taken, but then I remembered about the much underused .us domains. :)

@ Peter:

Yep! Also Hermoine turns out to be a dude in the last movie.

What? Snape kills Dumbledore?
Now you’ve spoiled it…

My favorite part of your service is the domain name. That’s clever.

If only I used Twitter, then I wouldn’t need to continue keeping my mouth shut about the identity of Luke’s (Skywalker, that is) father, out of fear of spoiling it for someone. 30 years is still too soon to risk it!