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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: When Arthur encounters Slartibartfast on the planet Magrathea it is explained that mice have spent a lot of their time in laboratories running complex experiments on humans, contrary to the humans thinking that it was them running experiments using mice. Slartibartfast explains to Arthur that "the business with the cheese and squeaking" was just a front for their true intelligence, and that they allowed humans to perform some "primitively staged" experiments on them in order to check how much humans had learned, and to give them "the odd prod in the right direction".

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It's a massive spoiler with no warning, and very unnecessary too. Next time consider simply alluding to HGTTG and something about mice?

> “It's a massive spoiler …”

I’m the sort of person who says out loud—“lalala”— when someone talks about a piece of entertainment I’ve not yet seen/read.

However this bit about mice in HGTTG isn’t a “massive spoiler” for a book full of similar jokes or inversions. It’s just a joke, and not revealing of a major *plot twist*, which is the generally accepted definition of a spoiler—there are more things like this in the book. By the end, hardly one is more shocking than another.

Now, if you want a real good spoiler, M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense”... lalalalala

I admit you have a point. You could say in a sense it's not that type of book where plot matters lots, maybe it's just how I read it as a child... though I still don't get why someone would describe straight up what happened in the book.

Thanks for not spoiling btw, I should add 6th sense to the list, heard the title before but didn't know it's by Shyalaman

> "I still don't get why someone would describe straight up what happened in the book."

I'm going to assume you're referring to online spoilers (in text). Most people I know don't have patience to speak about books in person.

It really has to do with the community and their standards. Over at Metafilter.com that community is focused mostly on culture and entertainment topics. They're conscious of spoilers. Posters are hoping to introduce the community to new content or to think of older content in a new light. They want to share, entice and peak your interest to seek, find and enjoy the content they're posting about--if they tell you the punch line, then they've ruined the joke. And this permeates to the comments as well.

What about HN? I see a lot of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, computing topics. What's the community standard for these disciplines? Prove you did the work. Share your sources. Explain what you mean. Quote. Link. And this permeates to the comments as well. Overwhelming detail is the standard. It's a feature, and not a bug (lalalala).

But if that explanation is too much of a stretch for you, let me share the immortal words of Chris Farley, "Remember when... [...] that was Awesome!" https://youtu.be/iK-04wOy2BM?si=mym_q0ZxxfD887a1&t=46

Dammit! I recorded that episode in 1978 and was going to listen to it tonight for the very first time. Now it's been ruined for me!

Do you expect people to be born already with all books published up until Date.now() in their heads?

I can't believe this needs to even be explained but the reason spoilers are spoilers and are discouraged is that some people sometimes save something very good for later (and guess what that's disproportionately the classics because they tend to be good) and some people are too young and have not had time to read all of what you read (even if they wanted to for some reason)

In this case additionally the spoiler (detailing plot point and revealing what work it's in) was not necessary at all

Next people will be telling us that we shouldn't reveal that the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything is '42'

Plot twist: KineticLensman is your fa.. [please stop reading here as this is a spoiler].

You allude but you don't spoil. If the original comment was something like "ah the sacrifices that the mice had to take as part of their experiments on humans" without revealing it as plot point in specific classic work it would not be a spoiler and could be way funnier

Consider the implications of your demands.

The implications of considering others before blurting stuff out are strictly positive! But maybe what you wrote is a reference that I didn't get:)

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