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Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

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Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#241

Post by Roboprog »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your know there are HN readers who write this crap. I wonder if they'll chime in on why they do.

So the other day I met the guy who makes all that crap on-line I told him you can have my cash But first you know I've got to ask What made you want to live this kind of life? He said there ain't no rest for the wicked, money don't grow on trees I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed; ain't nothing in this world for free I know I can't slow down I can't hold back though you know I wish I could Oh no there ain't no…

Ha ha, only serious, as they say.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#242

Post by skykooler »

Ruphin wrote: post #115

What you are really asking is for Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS to make a better web _for you_. Because you don't want media to autoplay does not mean it is a good solution to just block it outright for everyone. Some websites have legitimate use for autoplaying media. Some users (believe it or not) actually _like_ their videos autoplaying when they scroll through their Facebook feed or whatever media site they visi…

Indeed. Many websites have legitimate use-cases for auto-playing video. I don't want to click again on a youtube video to make it play.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#243

Post by fgandiya »

badwolf wrote: post #221
morganvachon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse for me is on mobile, scrolling down a news article, and suddenly this full page ad starts sneaking up from the bottom, with tiny text that says "keep scrolling to read the rest of the article". No thanks, apparently they didn't write that article to be read but rather to be a hook to get you to see that ad which takes over the screen. It's infuriating, bait and switch bullshit.

Oh god this is so awful. I just recently switched to an iPhone for work reasons. I used Adblock on my Rooted Nexus 6p, and never experienced this before. Now... all the frikkin time, to the point I rarely read news articles on my phone anymore.

I think iOS supports AdBlock there days so you could try one of those.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#244

Post by minitech »

Exuma wrote: post #125
ynak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm taking a more drastic way; turning media.{mp4, webm, ...}.enabled into False never let YouTube and other media autoplay(even play nomally) without any addons. When I want to watch videos, download them by youtube-dl and watch locally.

You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously? Sometimes the suggestions on HN are literally insane in the amount of effort people go through to avoid things that wouldn't be a problem in the first place if you did something simple like use adblock software. I saw some other post where a guy hand edits tens of thousands of entries in his hosts file... yeah dude what an amazing use of time.

> You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously?

I do this because the YouTube website (when the player is present) is too slow for my device. It adds about 5 seconds, nothing terrible.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#245

Post by DrBazza »

svckr wrote: post #82
tfgg wrote: post #37

Things that make me just close tabs straight away: 1) Autoplaying videos, especially ads. 2) Pop-ups / overlays. 3) Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around. Especially true if I'm just browsing around and click on something that looks interesting, the above will take that thing from "this might be worth 30 seconds" to "not worth it". Why kill that little dopamine boost someone just got from clickin…

Re 2): Pinterest. It's the cancer of Google image search. I don't get how Google's search ranking doesn't massively penalize that behaviour. I'd rather stomach an advertisement than the "plz register" BS.

Reminds me of the amusingly named 'expertsexchange' site, and the stackoverflow copies. Google shoved them down the ranking pretty quickly. Shame they don't do that to pinterest.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#246

Post by emidln »

In the past, I was responsible for analytics around a decision to autoplay or not autoplay videos on a media site. The site did both mobile and desktop videos.

    * voluntary customer feedback was universally negative
    * bounce rate decreased substantially (around 40%)
    * total interactions with the page increased almost 3x (clicks on significant  UX elements such as like/subscibe/additional video plays)
    * interactions for those using some form of adblock stayed the same (presumably these people also had an autoplay off plugin)
In summary, what users say they like and what they actually like are wildly different. The average user seemed to engage more when we removed the burden of first interaction.

*We did eventually kill autoplay, but only so we could have a consistent experience between YouTube and non YouTube videos (YouTube took efforts to stop counting autoplayed videos for advertising purposes).

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#248

Post by dredmorbius »

Yes, absoutely, and please.

I filed this bug myself July 2015, though I believe others have existed for years.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102

In the meantime, I've taken to blocking hosts and/or domains which are used to serve autoplay media. A small list generates exceptionally high mileage.

http://pastebin.com/FzAgkRnB

I implement this on the router via DDWRT, which protects the entire LAN. You can also add this to your own /etc/hosts file(s) on individual machines, or go further and have a local DNS server be authoritative for these services.

The block is intentionally global, and encouraged, as media providers themselves will find that they cannot reach anyone, anywhere so long as autoplay is a default.

Again: the Internet and Web are ultimately a user-determines-policy system. And if servers say "fuck you" loudly enough to users, then users can say "fuck you" back. And win.

DD-WRT instructions: https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#249

Post by digi_owl »

hub_ wrote: post #186
Shorel wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also change your browser, or with some browsers, a setting option.

There is a disable autoplay in Firefox as a hidden pref. Enabling it break YouTube (offender number 1) and Vimeo. Vimeo's take is that it is a bug in the browser hence it should be fixed. But then Vimeo are the same that told use to use Safari on Linux because Firefox "didn't support HTML5" (it did, just not encumbered H264 codec, but when you are lying, do the extra mile).

Whenever i interact with Vimeo i find it coming across as "hipster Youtube" if that makes any sense. Even when used for tech demo videos, everything from the lighting to the presenters scream "we are artists, not techies".

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#250

Post by fgandiya »

xrisk wrote: post #133
Exuma wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously? Sometimes the suggestions on HN are literally insane in the amount of effort people go through to avoid things that wouldn't be a problem in the first place if you did something simple like use adblock software. I saw some other post where a guy hand edits tens of thousands of entries in his hosts file... yeah dude what an amazing use of time.

Link to the guy who does this?

It might be this one from another comment

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

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