Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I have had so many books ruined by the summary. They will regularly include details about what happens in even the latter half of the story.

I never read them anymore. It's harder to find books, but at least I don't see literal spoilers.

View on HN

I’ve also seen this with the two sentence blurb about TV series episodes on streaming and broadcasting services.

Eg, I was really pissed off seeing Sky TV spoil Game of Thrones like this. I browsing TV schedule one night to see was on, and accidentally saw a GoT episode summary scroll by : “After the death of XXXXX, the characters try to…”

Maybe because it was a book already?

Otherwise there's somebody working there that is a monster.

I don’t even want to see the title of an It’s Always Sunny episode before the cold opening.

Titles don't usually spoil too much. At least the writers expect you to see them.

A lot of translated titles contain slight spoilers though, for example "predestination" becomes "time paradox" in Korean, it immediately gives you a hint of some part of the twist.

At least with Always Sunny the title is usually the punchline to a joke they set up in the cold open and then drop the title card.

Dee: "No that's a bad idea. Usually when you get involved somebody gets hurt."

Frank: "That's ridiculous. I'm just paling around with the guys. How is anybody going to get hurt?"

Title Card: "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire"

I've seen streaming services spoil an episode with just the thumbnail. I can't remember what show's twist was ruined for me, but I'm pretty sure it was Netflix.

Netflix also has a really annoying habit of re-ordering seasons. For some bizarre reason shows like bake off are listed with the most recently added series first. For some shows that might not be a huge problem but in the first episode of one series they actually recap the winners of all previous series, spoiling several years of programing for unwary netflix viewers.

At least one extremely typical problem on Netflix and basically every other streaming service is that the episode thumbnails (which I usually have to go take a look at just to find out how many episodes there are) will ruin any cliffhangers. If a character's survival seems uncertain, the uncertainty will be lessened quite a bit by seeing their face in the thumbnail of a subsequent episode.

Same. It's also quite a different experience reading a book without having any idea what it is about. Mostly Sci-Fi and Fantasy in my case.

These days I ask my partner to check for other books in a series. Even just trying to look up the sequels online can spoil quite a lot. This may sound like a hassle but it's actually not.

I’ve done this with movies sometimes, it can be a fun experience.

Agreed. I'd say the excerpts on the back of DVDs are actually worse than books. Have been burned by those a few times. Not that DVDs are that common anymore.

My personal worst experience of this was Philip K. Dick's Time out of Joint; since then I only read the blurbs after I'm finished.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com