It's the sort of thing that gets decided in a weekly meeting where some dipshit in middle management says "Guys, we need more engagement. Can we force them to watch a video? Is that possible? Seems like that should be possible." Then some long-suffering coder has to admit that yeah, it's possible. Then the coder then mumbles that it's also a bad idea and very obnoxious, and that most users will just mute it or leave the page...but the manager douchebag doesn't even hear it, because he's already patting himself on the back for his 'brilliant innovation'.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Meanwhile the real question is why major browsers don't seem to have a "do not ever fucking make a noise unless I explicitly tell you to" setting. I swear, Chrome and IE look like they do, but it never seems to actually work. And then there's "this setting is managed by your administrator" bullshit on top of that...
I think firefox's version works properly? At least, I've not noticed it as an issue since switching back to it from Chrome
Not specifically browser settings, but in Windows and Linux you should have access to a per application mixer and can reduce / mute the volume of your browser to zero.
Yeah but that mutes sound even if you want it (and toggling it back isn't exactly one click). I don't want to remove the ability to play sounds, I want to disable autoplay of anything that makes sounds (except perhaps if I white-list a site?). Or mute/unmute on a per-tab basis with the default being muted. As mentioned there are settings that you'd think would do this thing, but they're either bugged or deliberately crippled because I still seem to get plenty of autoplay video with sound that finds its way through on my work pc.
I feel this way about the "This website would like to send you notifications" popup. I will never, ever click accept on that. Why are you still asking. It's not even embedded in the website, it would be so easy to build a toggle into the browser to blanket reject those requests. Why is this even a """feature""" at all ffs, after email and push notifications and junk mail why do these shitty companies need yet another way to freely spam unwilling consumers. You did not under any circumstances have to hand this to them.
Nope. I uBlock element zap them if they happen to slip through the annoyance filter.
You pause/mute/close it at the top, and the damn thing has the audacity to follow you down as you scroll and resume playing. 😡
The following is the worst part.
Short answer is no.
Long answer is definitely no.
Medium answer No.
Extra long answer?
Believe it or not, also no.
Wouldn't the long answer be nooooooooooo!!!
I hate it so much infact that I actually remember which sites do it and don't click their links.
Fucking tragedy that "comedy news" websites like the onion and wonkette are actually head and shoulders above "respected" news sites in terms of professionalism.
I could actually see a complete reversal where they become the actual "Paper of record" and people refuse to even wipe their ass with a rag like the times or wapo.
Their advertisers do
I HATE THAT SHIT
It was precisely this crap that got me to switch from AdBlock Plus or other "fair" adblockers that let some unintrusive ads through to support the website, to uBlock origin, because it can remove those stupid auto playing videos.
I didn't like the scorched earth approach of uBO then (and still sometimes now), but any text and/or image based website shoving autoplaying videos down my throat doesn't deserve any support.
P.S. I'd like an optional way to allow unintrusive ads through in uBlock origin per site while still blocking any trackers that are not useless if the ad didn't exist.
I appreciate it in the same way I'd enjoy having an entire cactus jammed up my ass.
Which is to say, no.
No (except on pages that are specifically for a video), and I don’t think the “news” sites autoplay the videos because they think users want it; I think they do it because video ads pay more and it’s an easy way to slip a video ad in, especially as a pre-roll ad.
No one, ever:
News sites: Let’s autoplay a video when they hit the page!
No one, ever: . . .
News sites: Let’s put more ads in!
And the volume is always at least the double of whatever i was listening to
Don't like it. However, my phone and notebook are muted at all times. I never get a surprise blast of audio.
No, that’s why they autoplay.
If I am looking to know about a particular goings on, I will go through the news sites I trust to find the text article. I do not like video on news sites.
Any site that does it will not get a second visit from me. It’s really, REALLY fucking annoying when they do it. Especially for people who keep their volume up in general.
Ugh the only worse thing than that is the popups that beg for your email address the microsecond your mouse leaves the page area.
Whoever figures out how to block that shit would become king of all england
Or as soon as you scroll down there's a full page pop-up asking you to sign up or some other bullshit.
I don’t normally comment on anything but I literally have to know: did you use ChatGPT to write the first two paragraphs of your post? I skimmed your last couple posts and I don’t think you’re a bot, but this one and what looks like a battle rap(?) from the perspective of trump just give me major ChatGPT vibes. No judgement either way, I’m just curious if ChatGPT’s out here passing the Turing test lol.
Haha my brain just automatically skipped those first 2 paragraphs. I had to go back and read them, but they definitely sound like gpt
Not here, that's for sure, but keep in mind the community you're asking.
Absolutely not.
Why are you using chatgpt for that content? Don't bring that sh* to lemmy please
I don't like them. I have another question though, what do they benefits from playing it?
Easy, when they go to sell spots to advertisers: "Look, our video had 15,000 views last week" (except all of them were unwanted)
It's true! I used to sell web ad space for the local newspaper, and it was recommended that we click on all of our local ads when they pop up so at the end of the month we could say "Your ad was so effective, 100 people clicked on it!"
90 of them were me.
Some might put adds in front or at the end of videos. I'm sure the "viewer counts" also help them negotiate rates for adds on the page itself.
The MBA who's in charge of their website. See, they heard that video was the future of the web, so they got a ton of budget to add video. But when nobody clicked on the videos they had the brilliant idea to autoplay them, which dramatically increases video viewership, thus justifying their budget.
I hate them too.
I come to news sites to read articles, not watch videos. If I wanted to watch videos I would go to YouTube. It's as simple as that.
Making them autoplay is just adding insult to injury (as well as wasting bandwidth for literally no reason).
Let's do some napkin maths while we think how much energy has been wasted by autoplaying a video for every visitor.
If I were to guess, the video player pre-caches a few seconds of content, maybe up to 10. That's a fair few MB worth of reasonable quality video/audio data. Now multiply that for every single visitor. That's a lot of wasted energy. The page itself is likely ~1MB in size (at least you'd hope), so they're potentially increasing their costs by an order of magnitude by having the videos autoplay.
It's monumentally stupid.
I especially hate the auto-play in feed thing in the Android YouTube app. Threre's no audio but it makes me feel jumpy and irritable bc I'm not in control. The iOS version has an option to turn it off, which must be an Apple requirement. It makes no sense not to offer the option to YouTube subscribers since we don't see ads. Google is just wasting their bandwidth. Workaround is to start a video and pause it, but that's stupid. Just let me turn the shit off.
You can definitely turn that off, or at least I can on my S23. It may be a YouTube Premium feature.
Ok. Show me a screen shot. In the iOS version, the option is called "Playback in feeds" and appears at the bottom of the General section in Settings. This option does not exist in the Android version that I have. As I stated, I am a YouTube subscriber.
Settings -> General -> Playback in feeds. Options are Always on, WiFi Only, and off
v19. 09.38 downloaded from The Play Store
I could kiss you. I'm very sorry that I doubted you, Mr. Cat. I don't know when they added this but I guess I never saw it bc I expected the options to be in the same order in the iOS version.
Haha no problem!
Hell no. I thought we established this shit pretty early on with the web when it was just auto playing audio.
On a related subject, who the fuck signs up for newsletters when that popup blocks your ability to use the website? Who really wants newsletters in the first place? It's all just spam.
Oh not only will I say no I'll go one further. I was looking for chef John's recipe for chicken sausage potato onions but the one pot version. I was hoping to find the YouTube video for it but I couldn't spell the weird name he gave it. It would only give me the baked version. I did a search and found the web page recipe for it.
In the web page it started auto-playing the video that I really wanted to see. It pissed me off and I stopped it because I didn't feel like watching a thumbnail of it without comments or adequate controls. I did an inspect look up the embed ID and left to find it on peer tube.
Sometimes I want to video for something and just to shut my brain off and take it all in. Sometimes I'm looking for an exact piece of information and I just want to skim as little as possible collect the info and move along.
If I want one then they give me the other I'm not amused.
I think it's aimed at older people who are used to channel flipping on cable TV. In other words, mostly boomers, probably some older Gen X.
I loathe it deeply.