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> People really hate autoplaying video

Yes, this a billion-fold!

Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video.

The experience goes like this:

Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing.

Most annoying. However it gets more egregious...

The video player floats when you scroll down the page, until you reach the part of the page where it usually resides - and warps over into its little area - until you scroll past - whereupon it pops back up on the lower right hand side of your browser again.

Aaaaaargh!

Just as egregious : after viewing a video you might even have been interested inviewing, another video is automatically loaded onto that same player, 99.9% of the time on some completely unrelated subject.

Y'know, someone, somewhere, woke up one morning and thought "Great idea! Let's do <what is described above>!" - why can't the message that "People really hate autoplaying video" get back to whoever makes the decisions on user experiences, so that they just quit doing the above bullshit?



Stop visiting the sites then. There is nothing else you can do. Except maybe write them an email they'll ignore because their metrics (more like a "business analyst") tell them to autoplay videos.


Since this is posted to a site focused on developers, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the third option: Developers, stop adding all this crap to the software you’re writing and excusing it with “I’m just doin what I’m told!”


The video is not actually the problem (for me). It's the audio.

Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?



That's already in place. There's nothing in the way of actual user control other than muting the tab. The browser decides, pretty much, and you can't argue with it if it's decided to list a site as something that can autoplay audio based on your interaction level (which doesn't necessarily mean you've ever deliberately enabled audio on the site).


Yeah, thats a great one, especially if you are in a big office and forget to plug in your headphones.

There is a simple trick though:

about:config >> Search for "autoplay" (media.autoplay.enabled) >> set it to "false".

Some players might refuse to play media outright though.


If it can help you, think of the video as the content. It really is the only content that matters on that page.

Yes, the site only exists to deliver that video, not any news. That video earns revenues, news do not.




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