I love quizzes. Some of them are my favourite TV programmes, particularly Pointless, Mastermind and University Challenge. But lately there seems to be a small contingent of people trying to spoil my enjoyment of such programmes and it is frankly getting on my wick!
You see, I time shift my TV viewing. I don’t really like being told when I should watch a programme. I nearly always record EVERYTHING I watch. The only thing I ever watch ‘live’ is the news. Everything else is generally viewed on delay.
University Challenge is one of these programmes. Now, I don’t think of myself as in any way academic or brainy, but I like to test myself and sometimes due to recall (it can hardly be called ‘knowledge’ having a penchant for remembering things), I get a few answers right and feel a little more worthy of being a human on planet earth.
Now, I don’t mind the odd spoiler on a TV programme that’s drama or documentary based, these things can be easily avoided…but when people are tweeting answers to questions on University Challenge at the time it airs, I just have to wonder why? Why? Is your life that meaningless you feel the need to try to make yourself superior in a tweet stream? You surely CANNOT tweet an answer before the student(s) give(s) it?
I find it the hight of abuse of twitter etiquette to do such a thing.
This started with one lady I recently begun following. She seemed nice and thought I’d start following her. The first Monday night this happened (the Uni Challenge answer tweets), I let it slide. The second, I unfollowed her. Call that cruel – and perhaps maybe I should have said something (I did tweet a generalised note of ire about spoilers that night), but I’m sure she’d have felt she was doing nothing wrong. Perhaps she isn’t. Perhaps I’m just too damn uptight.
But tonight is the straw that broke the camel’s back! A friend on twitter whom I have followed for some time now has started doing the same thing! Now I am finding myself caught between a rock and a hard place. I make general tweets about spoilers and my dislike of them and how I time shift my television viewing but it seems to fall upon deaf ears (or is read by blind eyes!). And now I think, do I unfollow this lady? For good, just on Monday nights? What if I forget to follow her again come Tuesday morning? Am I being too anal?
I do love social networks and I love the sharing nature of them, but there HAS to be some etiquette! I try my damnedest not to reveal spoilers. A make general remarks “it’s good” – “you’ll like it” etc. If I am going to be specific I WARN people. I try to make my book reviews on Goodreads thorough but elusive to try to avoid giving spoilers and if I have to refer to something specific I use the *spoiler* tags. but when others don’t follow the basic etiquette, that’s when I fall out of love with socials >.<
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