Tip toe-ing around the internet on the days that follow your Game of Thrones, your Breaking Bads or your House of Cards airing has you like:
Spoilers are the legitimate kryptonite of our generation, and the efforts to curb their destruction of your entire life have been—up until this point—pretty damn weak. Fucking spoilers.
Doing God’s work as always is Google, who have been awarded a new patent to devise a system that will actively direct spoilers out of your line of sight and into the Dante’s fifth circle where they so rightly belong. Proud of you, angels.
Now, I’m unsure if the page decreeing Google’s patent in fact a piece of internet, seeing as the system is described in this one sentence, in Times New Roman:
A method comprising: receiving activity data describing an activity performed by a first user; determining a first progress stage for a subject associated with the activity based at least in part on the activity data; receiving content data published by a second user; determining whether the content data includes a spoiler for the first user based at least in part on the first progress stage; responsive to determining that the content data includes the spoiler, obscuring the content data published by the second user from the first user; generating a spoiler warning indicating that the obscured content data includes the spoiler; and providing the spoiler warning to the first user.
See. It’s just so simple.
For the laymen among us, Google’s system could be developed for social networks, in connection to user’s TV/media streaming habits. The system could theoretically work as such: you’re up to episode 10 of Breaking Bad’s fourth season (per your streaming history on your service of choice); Google then blocks any spoilers it detects from your awful friends of episode 11 onwards.
It could look something like this, according to Quartz. The actual development of the product is at this stage unknown.
Praise this wizardry.
via Quartz.
