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Reddit Is Banning Users That Post Star Wars 7 Spoilers (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A few naughty users have started spamming Reddit with Star Wars 7 spoilers, but also hoaxes. Some known Star Wars fans with Reddit accounts were even bombarded with PMs about the upcoming film, with trolls trying to ruin the movie before they saw it. As a result, Reddit is now banning any user that posts Star Wars 7 spoilers. The movie officially launches tomorrow; do you plan to see it? Do you care about spoilers?
Reddit isn't banning anyone. The moderators of that particular subreddit are and they are not Reddit employees. Someone doesn't seem to understand how Reddit works.
Wrong, if you check imdb you'll see he's in the credits for SW8.
So, how about people who like other movies and don't like getting spoilers? Or is this a Star Wars Master Race thing where everyone else are second class citizens that doesn't deserve protection?
Encountering new narratives is one of narrative's fundamental pleasures. Novelty is so important to narratives that in many cases entire classes of aesthetic effects and domains of hermeneutic structures depend on an audience's relative ignorance about what happens next.
So, it's not just courtesy to label narrative "secrets" spoilers if they are unexpected; doing so protects the value of narratives for future audiences, and the act of people coming to their own understandings about a narrative is worth protecting because, in many ways, our very identities are constructed from the kinds of narratives we encounter and the lessons we learn as we experience (and later reflect on) the things we experience as we discover a narrative that is new to us.
I take a pragmatic approach. If I'm on the web and writing about a recently-produced (within a year) narrative, I label my reveals with clear ***SPOILER ALERT***s. On the other opposite hand, if I'm writing for (say) a literary journal about Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_, I don't bother with them because the target audience understands they are expected to have already read the narrative I'm discussing.
But most discussions which contain narrative "secrets" fall somewhere in the middle, like a 400-year old story called _Romeo and Juliet_ which is one of the cornerstones of Modern aesthetic culture. Or maybe you're discussing a 2500-year old story about a king searching for the cause of the plague across his kingdom called _Oedipus Rex_ (well, the spoiler comes up front in that play, but you get the idea). My habit is to label those middle-ground reveals as spoilers, too, something I think everyone should do to protect the value of those narratives for future generations.
In other words, be a good human being and care for those who come after you by labelling your spoilers and being sensitive to the audience who will encounter what you write perhaps in an entirely different context.
I applaud Reddit's decision to block (banning may be a little extreme) users who want to destroy the aesthetic and epistemological value of a long-awaited narrative. I wish Slashdot and all my other Internet favorites would do something similar not only for Abrams' _The Force Awakens_ but for ALL narratives.
For my part, I knowingly took a risk even coming here to post, given that Slashdot is (rightly) renown for allowing all speech to flourish (to various degrees subject to the moderation system). But that uncritical acceptance of all speech also means that I will not come back to this thread until AFTER I've seen Abrams' contribution to the Star Wars franchise.
See you at the movies!
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