My spoiler policy for television is after it airs on the west coast it’s fair game. The picture went up at 2 am. If you’re reading Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook (or any source for current events whether it be sports, news, entertainment, etc), if you’re on the Internet in general, you run the risk of spoilers. In this particular case, the winner of a reality show, that to me is like the Oscars or a big game.
With DVR, DVD, and time shifting there’s too much grey area regarding the grace period for spoilers. There’s no way to please everyone. Is one day enough? Is two days enough? What about someone who was planning to watch it this weekend? Personally, I try to watch things on the same night, but am aware that if I don’t, I could see spoilers. It’s the individual’s responsibility.
Yeah, if you want to watch something one day later, just avoid the entire internet for a day! That’s a reasonable solution. After all, it is very important to just post a photo of the winner on Tumblr so anyone who didn’t watch it live gets it ruined. It adds a lot to the conversation!
Disagreeing with Frucci is tough but I’m gonna try to do it anyways.
People who openly post spoilers are dicks. And not just the day of or the day after! With DVR, Netflix, etc. I’ll always have a friend who’s watching Twin Peaks for the first time and doesn’t know who killed Laura Palmer. So to even post a spoiler 20 years later would make me a dick.
You could argue that Pop Culture Brain is a news source so they’re just doing their job. Yeah, maybe, but you can still do your job with invisotext or “Photo of Top Chef Winner After the Jump!” So that was lame - even after waiting for it to air on the west coast. Lesson learned.
But to the folks who get pissed off- TV events (I’ve never seen Top Chef but apparently this was an event) are newsworthy. It is infinitely easier for one person to not check Twitter or Tumblr for a day then to ask the millions of people who watched it live to keep a secret. They should keep a secret but, invariably, there’s someone who never learned this. Plus, where do you draw the line? Am I not allowed to Tweet during the Super Bowl? Cause I do know somebody who waited till he got home from work to watch. Should I stay silent the whole game so he can find out how terrible the Black Eyed Peas are on his own?
(Sorry if I just ruined the Black Eyed Peas performance for anyone.)
Comparing Top Chef to the Oscars or the Super Bowl is a pretty lousy way of justifying this. No one watches the Oscars or the Super Bowl on DVR the next day. Top Chef is a reality TV show; the results aren’t “news.” To post the winner as news, who is that for? Who wants that news? If you’re a fan of the show, you either watched it and already know, or you are planning on watching it and in no way want to know. If you aren’t a fan of the show, you could give a fuck because it is not news at all. It is the results of a TV show.
My job is unique in that I need to read Tumblr and Twitter and such all day, so just not going online is not an option. Maybe for some people it is. That’s fine! But really, I wouldn’t have had to avoid everything to not get this spoiled, just this one Tumblr post. And what pisses me off the most is that the post that he’s defending is literally of zero value to anyone. It is a photo, and it says Top Chef underneath it. For those who knew the results, it offered them a brief chance to say to themselves “oh yeah, I saw that last night.” For everyone else, it was a kick in the pants spoiler. If he had even written a single sentence that added something to it, some sort of insight, anything, maybe that’d be more justifiable. But it was just a picture, just a pure spoiler with no additional value whatsoever. How is that worth defending? Who is this for? What’s the upside?
