The algorithm is ruining film and TV, and we need to talk about it

You can tag your spoilers, people!

You know what's a just fine piece of telly? Arcane! It's an absolute stunner to look at, I'll give it that, but I personally don't find the story all that compelling, and season 2 is rushed beyond belief. As a lover of animation I really did just watch it for Fortiche's in-house style, that served me well enough, but I do still find spoilers annoying like anybody else, even for a show whose story I'm not that invested in. Thanks to "the algorithm", though, I didn't really have much of a choice in having pretty much all of Arcane season 2 spoiled for me.

You see, I didn't rush to check out the second season, I wasn't eagerly anticipating it like many fans. I was happy to wait! There were plenty of other things for me to be getting on with, and I had a bit of a bug around when the first act dropped, so I wasn't rushing off of my feet to see what's what. Except over the course of the three weeks the three acts released over, I just kept seeing more and more spoilers, whether it be a site like Twitter (uh, X), or TikTok, they were all just there, because the algorithm thinks I want to see them.

I do think there's something to be said of there being quite bad spoiler etiquette on the internet these days. A lot of younger people didn't grow up on Tumblr where you could filter what content you wanted to see by tags, and most people would appropriately label their posts if their were spoilers - unfortunately, with the death of Tumblr as it used to be, fandom shifted over to Twitter because where else was it meant to? But because Twitter works completely differently, the culture of fandom broadly changed, habits no longer stuck for most people, and now we're at a point where people are desperate to be the ones to get their thoughts out first because they might be rewarded with a small bit of clout.

Don't get me wrong, clout chasing on the internet has been around for the longest time, but particularly over the past few years it's gotten worse and worse, and I think it's because of "the algorithm." Because the days of blogs and forums are dead and we're all stuck on social media ad infinitum, all we have is "the algorithm", this monster we have to feed into, even if that means spoiling something for someone else. I'm just quite fed up with it.

There's always something new to watch, but fewer opportunities to watch it completely unfiltered. Last year that manifested in quite annoying ways with Jujutsu Kaisen, with manga readers seemingly doing everything they can to ruin upcoming story beats for anime-onlys - I was hit with a couple of big spoilers, prompting me to bite the bullet and just catch up with the manga (something I don't regret doing, there's a whole bunch of stuff I would have hated to be spoiled on at the end of the series).

Yeah, already knew about this twist too. | Image credit: VG247

And that was a weekly show too! It's made all the worse by the fact that Arcane season 2, despite having nine episodes, was released over three weeks. That pesky binging model that Netflix established means you have to Consume Right Now, and if you get spoiled and complain about it, some chud is guaranteed to enter your replies blaming you for not staying off the internet until you could watch it.

That's obviously a ridiculous argument because 1. the internet is my job in my particular case and 2. why should I have to? Can you not just wait to talk about your blorbo kissed your other blorbo? But still, again, I find it entirely hard to blame any individual for posting a spoiler. They're just doing so thinking it'll stay within their particular fandom's sphere, but "the algorithm" gives much less than two shits about your intention. It is hungry, it demands sustenance so it can regurgitate it to anyone that will look at it.

I don't have a fix for this other than maybe stopping spending time in these places, which in Twitter's case is getting easier and easier (did you know we're over on Bluesky now?), but I think I'm owed at least one little moan about this. And seriously, Arcane season 2 - the whole thing was a bit rushed, right? Not even being spoiled on it can help that.