Do you have questions about social media, video making, video games, etc.? “Dear Melly” is our geeky advice column, so why not send your questions my way? All questions should be sent to dearmelly@commongeek.tv or posted on any social media site with #dearmelly.
“How do I avoid spoilers without having to avoid the internet?” – Addy
Dear Addy,
First off, here’s the thing: You don’t. You can’t – not entirely, anyway. The internet is an exciting place full of excited people. As a whole people tend to jump on new things at the dawn of their existence and they share everything about those things. It’s nearly impossible to avoid every spoiler out there, but I have discovered a few tricks that can minimize the number of spoilers you are subjected to. Here are those tricks, categorized by the website to which they are relevant:
Tumblr: I’m putting this one first because it is generally the hardest to avoid spoilers on, but anyone who uses Tumblr generally doesn’t want to give it up and they shouldn’t have to. First, download and install Tumblr Savior (http://bjornstar.com/tumblr-savior.) If you’re a Tumblr user you are probably familiar with this tool but just in case you aren’t, it basically allows you to block certain types of posts by blacklisting tags and it’s super user friendly. The obvious solution here would be to blacklist the names of the things you don’t want spoiled, but if we’re being honest, the majority of people don’t tag their posts properly. So here’s what you do: Blacklist “.gifs.” I rarely ever see spoilers on my dashboard and it’s not because I have blacklisted shows (I haven’t blacklisted any;) it’s because I have all gifs blacklisted. Most spoilers come in the form of gifs and you can undo this anytime you want if you don’t want to permanently miss out on all of those fun wizard pictures.
Twitter: I have heard TweetDeck (https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck) can help with this, but have never tried it myself. What I do is this: Read Hashtags First. Most people on Twitter actually do use hashtags and you can easily glance at the end of a tweet first to see if the name of whatever you are trying to avoid is there. If it is, scroll down as fast as you possibly can.
YouTube: Do I even need to include this? Don’t watch videos about whatever you are trying to avoid spoilers of. It’s really that simple.
Facebook: Just don’t go on Facebook while you’re attempting to avoid spoilers. There is really no system to avoid certain topics and, honestly, it’s not that great anyway.
Good luck in your quest to avoid spoilers,
Melly
