WFTB – A NOTE ABOUT SPOILERs

We at LOST_WFTB (and by that I mean all of the tweeps that are tweeting/live-tweeting, etc) want to be first time watcher friendly.  Nothing beats seeing/hearing/reading a first time watcher say, “Whoa, that’s Jack’s Dad!” while watching S1E5 – White Rabbit.  If you’ve read that you’ll already understand the dilemma we face.  We can’t go all Tyler Durden and proclaim the first rule about LOST_WFB is to not talk about LOST.  In fact the whole idea of LOST_WFTB is kinda anti-Tyler Durden, we want to TALK about LOST.

After five seasons of prime time television, the intertoobs are rife with theories, explanations etc about LOST.  If you’re a first time watcher, the only way to avoid spoilers is to grab all the box sets of LOST, a DVD player and shutdown your internet until you can push through all the episodes you can on DVD.  Then hit ABC.com (or alternate video sources) and plow through season 5.  That is your best bet, sure fire way to avoid spoiling yourself.

All in all we should announce a disclaimer at the beginning of each Live Tweet session.

#LOST #WFTB can't guarantee spoiler free live tweets, so new watchers live tweet under a risk of spoilers.

What we can do is provide a convention, out of extreme courtesy to provide a way for new viewers to enjoy a live tweet, along with people that have invested 5 seasons of TV watching to our favorite show.

What we’ve adopted is to add an ‘s’ onto the episode hashtag if you’re tweet is going to be spoilerish for someone who hasn’t watched past the current episode.  (i.e. non-spoilerish episode 7 tweet would use #s1e7, while a spoilerish tweet would use #s1e7s.)  @batchout goes through the trouble of linking to Twitter search string for first-timers and a different search string for re-watchers.  However, the first-time watcher could still be spoiled, and the first-time watcher must be responsible for their own possible spoiling.

There are various ways to screen out possible spoilers, if someone is participating in a live tweet and doesn’t want to worry about special hashtags, then just announce at the beginning, “Yo, I’ve watched this for 5 years, expect my posts to be spoilerish.”  Then a first-time watcher can decide for themselves to exclude that tweeps username from the search, unfollow that person, etc…

This isn’t rocket science.

So… last word.  We’re mostly a bunch of re-watchers.  So live-tweeting is a mine field of possible spoilers.  If you’re a first time watcher, you live tweet under the risk of being spoiled.

As usual, use the comments to tell me where I’m wrong. (you can even use MORE than 140 characters.

Namaste.