Netflix's Dark Season 3 is here: How to avoid spoilers, actually any spoiler, without having to go offline

The last and final season of Dark is about to drop and we are beyond excited. Obviously. But as much as we’d like to watch it the moment it premiers, we understand that might not be possible thanks to work and house chores. There will be lucky people out there enjoying their Saturdays who will start binging on the show ASAP and will be bouncing off the walls with things they want to discuss and debate.

That’s great for them, may they find their tribe. But for you and me, these are spoilers. And if there is something we hate more than Jon Prosser tweeting a leak just when we are about to call it a day, it’s spoilers. Especially for shows we LOVE. You can tell us all about the latest season of Sinner and we won’t care. But ruin Dark for us and we are coming for you.

But some of you out there are just terrible, terrible people who don’t deserve the Internet. And while we can do nothing about your high-speed broadband, going offline till we are done watching is not a realistic state of affairs. Have faith, though, there are ways to avoid spoilers without taking a sabbatical from the worldwide web.

How to avoid spoilers on Twitter

Twitter is notorious for spoilers and ones that come without a ‘spoiler alert’ warning. The best way to avoid spoilers here is to mute words, phrases and hashtags connected to the show and/or movie you are waiting to watch.

Here’s how you mute them -

- Log into your account and go to the Settings and privacy option from the main menu

- Click on Privacy and safety from the dropdown menu and under the Safety tab, select Muted

- Click on Muted words and the + option in the upper-righthand corner to add filters. Include all hashtags connected to the show/movie here. For example for Dark you might want to go with #Dark #DarkSpoilers #DarkonNetflix #DarkNetflix etc.

Since Twitter filters are not case or punctuation sensitive, we suggest you put in all variations of the hashtags you can think of. You can also type a phrase or hashtag in Twitter search to see what other hashtags people are using for the show/movie concerned and add them to your list of muted words too.

- Select Save to add the new muted word(s) to your account

You can choose to filter tweets with these words from your home timeline and your notifications whether you are following an user or not. You can also choose exactly how long you intend to mute these words - like 24 hours, a week, a month etc. You also have an option to keep it forever (till you manually remove the filter).

How to avoid spoilers on Facebook

It’s a little harder to filter out spoilers on Facebook as compared to Twitter. The Keyword Snooze Facebook was testing in 2018, which would have functioned the way Twitter’s muted words does, has been rolled back.

What you can do on Facebook is to ‘snooze’ a friend or a page for upto 30 days. Identifying a page you want to snooze or temporarily unfollow is easy, you will need to single out friends who have posted spoilers in the past and are definitely going to do it again. You can unfollow these friends for a while without having to unfriend them.

For this you need to select a post from your friend or from the page you want to snooze and put the restrictions in place. That’s all.

How to avoid spoilers on the web at large

There are some third-party apps that can help you block spoilers across the internet. These can be installed right on your browser. Here are some options -

Spoiler Protection 2.0 (Google Chrome and Firefox)

Unspoiler (Google Chrome)

IMDb Hide Episode Spoilers (Google Chrome)

Shut Up (Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari)

TinyFilter PRO (Google Chrome)

These browser extensions give you the ability to set up custom filters for web browsing. Some of these, like Shut Up and IMDb Hide, focus particularly on the parts of the web that are usually rife with spoilers like comment sections and IMDb pages.

However, make sure you do a little check, like read the app store reviews maybe, before you download any third-party app.

Now, pick your shield of choice and get going. We’ll see you in 33 years. Or not.