Warning: This story contains mild spoilers for The Last of Us.
The Last of Us was spoiled for me on X because I was an hour late to watching the latest episode. The following day, I spoiled it for someone else.
As social media gets better at serving us content based on what we like, it’s also getting easier to find a community to discuss TV and movies with. It also feels like avoiding spoilers is impossible.
Appointment TV like The White Lotus and The Last of Us has forged excitement and fandom bonding, but there are immediate consequences for tardiness. Hype surrounding movies is getting people back into theaters, but if you're too busy to catch it on opening weekend, you might know the full plot before even buying a ticket.
“My relationship with the internet has changed. I’m mad at it most of the time now,” Donna Talarico, a writer, told Yahoo Entertainment. “People often say, ‘If you don’t wanna see a spoiler, scroll past it.’ Um, if I know to scroll by, I already saw it.”
Platforms like Reddit, Discord and Tumblr encourage spoiler tags that fans can use to protect those who haven’t caught up. X, Instagram and TikTok have them too, technically — you can mute certain words and hashtags — but doing so is visible and might impact the post’s performance, so they’re not as popular. If people don’t use them, they might as well not exist.
Nahla Bendefaa, a media scholar and “semi-retired member of various fandoms,” told Yahoo Entertainment that it’s definitely getting harder to avoid spoilers because of “intertextuality and porous lines between different fandom[s] and the regression of the [X] algorithm.”
“Some fandoms are just more obnoxious than others,” she added.
Taylor Marx, a social media specialist, watched seasons 1 and 2 of The White Lotus weekly. She was busy during Season 3 and didn't watch on Sunday nights when the episodes aired.
“Every week there’d be spoilers I couldn’t avoid and I promised myself I’d catch up. Never happened,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “I know basically all that happened and I have no desire to go back and watch.”
Some people feel strongly that this is just how social media works now, and users need to adapt.
Quinci LeGardye, a writer, told Yahoo Entertainment that she stayed off of X between Thursday night and Sunday afternoon to avoid spoilers for Sinners, which had just come out in theaters. It worked, and she spent less time on her phone.
“It's my responsibility to stay off socials if I truly don't want to be spoiled,” Elyssa Mann, a marketer, told Yahoo Entertainment. “And if I can't live without Twitter or whatever for a day or two, I need to look at myself really hard in the mirror.”
But what about the people in other countries and time zones, where episodes drop in the middle of the workday or on a different day entirely? The White Lotus aired on Mondays rather than Sundays in India. When new episodes of The Pitt hit Max in Australia, it was 11 a.m. local time.
Most of the pop culture fans who spoke with Yahoo Entertainment seemed to agree that there should be a standard for spoilers: Wait a full 24 hours before posting revealing plot details about a TV show available to stream, and at least a week for a movie that’s in theaters.
None of that would be a problem if people used filters and tagged their spoilers, though.
"I typically create filters on hashtags and keywords, but if people don't use them, it's really hard to avoid," Brandon Powers, a choreographer, told Yahoo Entertainment. He was calling me out personally; I'd spoiled a character's death in The Last of Us 12 hours after it aired by reposting a meme about the pope's death.
He wanted to avoid spoilers for a while because he hadn't started the new season yet — it started a little too soon after The White Lotus for his taste.
“My friends and I have a Discord server where we talk about different shows we're watching together,” Powers said. “Each show has its own channel, so we can tailor notifications and avoid spoilers accordingly. We also use the spoiler feature a lot, which redacts the text in the message.”
“Because hashtags have gone out of style, there's really no good way of filtering out spoilers. The only platform where it works properly is Tumblr because people there still tag stuff,” Cat, an e-commerce manager, told Yahoo Entertainment.
Some people have come to accept spoilers as a part of life.
"I consider myself an outlier in that I don't mind spoilers at all. I think if the story and writing is good, a spoiler wouldn't make a difference in terms of enjoying the show or movie," Mary Sheehan, a library assistant, told Yahoo Entertainment. She lives in Ireland, and the Yellowjackets Season 3 finale was spoiled the day before she was able to watch it.
“Honestly, seeing the spoiler made me even more excited to watch. I couldn’t wait to see the episode,” she said.
It's not hard for Anson Tong, a writer and photographer, to cope with the fact that most things people online are excited about will be mildly spoiled if she doesn't keep up. She was "forced" off X to avoid spoilers for The White Lotus and Severance when those shows were airing, but for shows like Yellowjackets or The Pitt that she hasn't seen but intends to watch, she's comfortable with "vague ideas of things that might have happened … or that people just really want to happen."
“Honestly, people bickering about stuff and conspiratorial theorizing might bother me more,” she told Yahoo Entertainment.
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