so without necessarily going into recent specifics if you don't want to or can't... what do you think the pros and cons for narrative designers is of a community ban on discussion of certain story details? is it ever a technique that can be useful? is it more relevant to service games... or does it in the long term hinder a writing team by making it harder to get a fanbase on the same collective page about the setting and story? just broadly curious to hear your thoughts about this aspect of "spoiler culture" as a designer of something so story driven.
I don't really have a generic opinion on this because it's so unusual in the first place. Some games disable console share features during specific segments or cutscenes to keep those off social media. To me that just feels like a weird, overbearing takeover of the user's device, and it mostly means that the people who get to share those moments are professional youtubers with capture cards; it's ineffectual. That's the only non-Failbetter example I can think of.
In general, I think secrets and mysteries are important beyond whether or not you can go around them to get the answer from somewhere else anyway. The various moments in Pathologic 2 where you can trade away your right to a moment of comfort or a satisfying narrative beat aren't lessened just because you can go look at a let's play on YouTube to see what you missed. There's an energy to actually finding and seeing something in-game that's not matched by seeing a screenshot. And a truly great mystery is one that hits even if you were casually spoiled, because the beauty is in how everything falls into place when it unfolds.