The worst genre of “spoilers aren’t bad” articles is the recurring “actually, spoilers are good for you” article.
Each inevitably points to this paper from eight years ago as proof, but if you look at the results in Figure 1 you’ll notice that the differences between enjoyment levels–or, I shit you not, “mean hedonic ratings”–with spoilers and enjoyment levels without spoilers are negligible. In other words, the results easily can be used to argue that the reported increase in enjoyment when having been spoiled is so ridiculously small that it’s not worth ruining the enjoyment of those who prefer not to be spoiled.
It’s one thing to point out that no one’s enjoyment of Romeo and Juliet is ruined by the fact that Chorus spoils the play in its sixth line, bluntly proclaiming, “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.” It’s another thing to suggest we have no responsibility to try to respect the ways in which people want to enjoy things absent such an authorial choice.
Perhaps this all is yet another under-examined aspect of how the excitement of social media’s (especially Twitter’s) rolling public discussion overtook the web’s earlier sense that there were private spaces and public spaces which could be balanced. Once upon a time, we could discuss spoilers in our own (semi-)private spaces, and people could read, or not. Comment, or not. We could leave our favorite public chat room if people started talking about something we hadn’t yet seen.
Now, it’s all out in the open because too many people react in real-time on Twitter. Most clients allow muting hashtags or keywords, but many people don’t even bother with those, thereby demonstrating not even the minimum possible effort.
The only thing “gained” by repeatedly turning to this paper to defend spoilers is an increase in the number of assholes smugly telling other people they’re wrong about what they enjoy and how they enjoy it.