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Facebook’s New Snooze Feature Saves Us From Spoilers and Spoiler Culture

Facebook introduced a new feature that allows you to snooze keywords so users can avoid triggering phrases and sweet, sweet movie spoilers.

Facebook is rolling out a new feature that allows users to snooze keywords they don’t want to see on their timeline. It’s an expansion of an existing feature that lets users to snooze groups and people they don’t want to hear from. Simply click the three dots next to a post and select “snooze” to put a friend or group on a 30-day suspension from your personal feed without alerting them.

Soon, users who need a break from news about Trump will be able to snooze certain related keywords for 30 days. Facebook announced the rollout of the keyword snooze Wednesday morning in a blog post. “Ever read a spoiler online before you’ve watched the last episode of the season? Or maybe you waited years for a movie sequel only to have your favorite blogger reveal the ending?” wrote Facebook News Feed Product Manager Shruthi Muraleedharan in the post.

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Facebook is selling this feature as a way to avoid spoilers, which is great because I’m tired of people complaining about them. Paranoia about spoilers is ruining our ability to talk about movies and TV effectively. Whenever I write a movie review, talk about a video game, or mention a television show, one of the first comments will inevitably be about how I spoiled it without fair warning.

This is despite the fact that most of my articles include bolded warnings of spoilers at the top. Also: why did you click on the article if you didn’t want to hear my thoughts on the whole work? And the definition of a spoiler keeps expanding. It used to be enough to not talk about the ending, but increasingly people don’t want to know any specific story beats or even the cast list for fear of ruining their viewing experience.

This is a good time to mention, by the way, spoilers for Mad Men and Breaking Bad follow – two shows that finished airing in 2015 and 2013, you nerds.

If all that mattered is the shock of the ending, then we’d never re-read a book or rewatch a television show. We know that Walter White dies at the end of Breaking Bad, but we watch to see him degenerate. The show is about his hubris, not his death, and the beats along the way are more important than the foregone conclusion of his demise. Knowing that Don Draper turns enlightenment into a Coke commercial doesn’t lessen the journey of Mad Men, it just casts it in a more poignant light.

My generation (I’m a millennial) is obsessed with endings. We’re stuck in a perpetual state of aspiration, obsessing about what’s on the horizon, what’s next, and where we’ll end up. We don’t enjoy the journey. Will our lives really be ruined if we learn the title of Avengers 4 too early? Does the early confirmation of the cast list really destroy our ability to enjoy a television show? No. It doesn’t.

My girlfriend reads summaries of television shows after they’ve aired but before she watches them. As we’ve moved through this season of The Handmaid’s Tale, she’s known everything that’s about to happen. That foreknowledge hasn’t lessened the brutality of Gilead. Every moment of the show still feels like a gut punch to her. If the story is good, knowing how it plays out doesn’t matter.

Facebook’s snooze feature will free people from having to hear spoilers, which is great from my perspective. Either they'll stop complaining because they can mute those spoilers, or I'll just mute the word "spoiler" myself.