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New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

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Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#71

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

GhostVII wrote: post #24
zbrozek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it's hard to support legislation that's likely to have a lot of unintended consequences, it's also important to realize what's driving folks to introduce a bill like this. It's also worth pointing out that (in particular with Netflix) your example is its own counter-argument. You can't turn off autoplay, and that's the opposite of letting me make choices for myself. There's also plenty of other exa…

I think the choice is to just leave Netflix when you are done an episode. Maybe it's just me but I've never felt like the autoplay makes me much more likely to keep watching, it is just convenient so I don't have to go through all of the menus again. If we ban autoplay on Netflix, we should also ban cable I suppose (not a big loss, really), since cable will autoplay indefinitely.

And we'll have to ban Radio.

We'll also need to ban most major highways, as they keep going and going and going. And don't forget to ban unlimited refills at McDonalds, I'm sure those get people into trouble too. How does the fast food industry get such a big free pass on all the trouble it's caused?

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#72

Post by modoc »

lloeki wrote: post #55
GhostVII wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the choice is to just leave Netflix when you are done an episode. Maybe it's just me but I've never felt like the autoplay makes me much more likely to keep watching, it is just convenient so I don't have to go through all of the menus again. If we ban autoplay on Netflix, we should also ban cable I suppose (not a big loss, really), since cable will autoplay indefinitely.

I find autoplay on Netflix highly inconvenient. Disable it and you can continue to watch the next episode with just one button press. There is no need for navigating around. Also super useful when you happen to fall asleep in front of the TV so that it doesn't keep pumping all the way through the night. Autoplay on Netflix is IMHO a dark pattern to feed on attention and FOMO.

Is it any different than traditional TV?

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#73

Post by Nullabillity »

Asooka wrote: post #69
Nullabillity wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlawing X doesn't mean almost-X is completely fine. That said, none of your examples make much sense (to me). > - autoplay of gifs vs web videos Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video. > - does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad It's primarily fo…

> Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video. By that logic a loading spinner is an auto-playing video. Does me logging in count as "active user interaction" for showing me a loading spinner? I didn't request the spinner, I requested access to my skype c…

The spinner fulfils a purpose (by notifying you that the content is still not quite ready) and is temporary (it goes away once the content is loaded). That said, you could always just replace it with a static "Loading.." label.

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#74

Post by magduf »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #37
mc32 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m torn about endless scrolling. I wholeheartedly agree with a ban on auto playing sound or video. It’s gratingly irritating. It’s rather anti-human, experience wise.

> It’s gratingly irritating. Right. But just because something is irritating does that mean it should be illegal? This seems like something that we don't need to waste taxpayer money on IMO. I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.

It doesn't waste taxpayer money for Congresscritters to write a law and pass it. They're paid a salary anyway, so it's just a bit of their time, and something like this shouldn't take long to debate and pass.

Plus, they could make money on it by levying enormous fines on websites that break the law. I'd love to see various news websites get slapped with $100M fines for having autoplay videos.

>I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.

Like what? Fixing our utterly broken healthcare system? That isn't realistic at all because they can't get enough agreement in Congress to pass such legislation. So they need to focus on things they can get done, like banning autoplay.

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#75

Post by rsweeney21 »

I'm the dev that built Netflix's autoplay of the next episode. We built it first on the web player because it is easy to A/B test new features there. We called it "post-play" at the time.

When I worked there the product team at Netflix had two KPIs all new features were tested against: hours watched and retention. We would come up with all sorts of ideas to try out, and release them to small user populations of about 100,000 or so. It was great because you didn't have to debate much about whether a new feature was a good idea or not, you just built it and tested it. If the feature didn't increase hours watched or retention in a statistically significant way, the feature was removed.

Autoplay massively increased hours watched. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it was by far the biggest increase in the hours watched KPI of any feature we ever tested. There was some skepticism about whether the number was inflated by Netflix continuing to play when the user left the room.

As part of the autoplay test, we tested how long the countdown should be between episodes. 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 15 seconds. 10 seconds caused the biggest increase in hours watched. We thought that it gave people time to digest what they had just watched, but wasn't too fast (5 seconds) where it became jarring. Interestingly, Netflix recently changed the countdown between episodes to 5 seconds. That means they tested it out and found that people watch more if with a shorter countdown. This didn't use to be the case. Netflix user have become conditioned to expect autoplay.

So yes, Netflix wants you to spend more hours watching Netflix and the product team is scientifically engineering the product to make it more addictive.

But...the product team at Doritos does the same thing.

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#76

Post by torgoguys »

hedora wrote: post #26

This is textbook regulatory capture. Want to host your own website? Be sure to hire a specialized lawyer to audit and sign off on the user interface choices you made (and be sure to retain them indefinitely as your dependencies and the law evolve).

> This is textbook regulatory capture.

I do not think it means what you think it means. (Or maybe I don't! :-)

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#77

Post by magduf »

GhostVII wrote: post #52
mc32 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m torn about endless scrolling. I wholeheartedly agree with a ban on auto playing sound or video. It’s gratingly irritating. It’s rather anti-human, experience wise.

But autoplay do you mean sounds and videos that autoplay when you go on a website, or sounds and videos which are automatically queued up after something you are already watching? Because I agree that the first is very irritating (there is nothing that I hate more than Netflix autoplaying previews with sound), but I find queuing up the next video very useful.

It seems pretty self-evident that "autoplay" means something that plays automatically. Queuing isn't playing.

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#78

Post by magduf »

GhostVII wrote: post #50
nix0n wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill as written[0] is limited to social media sites and has an exception for music playlists, so both your examples would be allowed. [0] https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/So...

For YouTube I don't use a playlist, I just let it pick the next recommendation, so that would still be banned. They added an exception for advertisements, which is too bad since that is the only kind of autoplay video I would really be excited about getting rid of. The definition of autoplay in the bill is "The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, s…

Autoplaying advertisements are one of the main reason autoplay is so annoying. WhyTF would they make an exception for this? This seems like obvious corruption.

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#79

Post by tenebrisalietum »

zazaraka wrote: post #35
digitalneal wrote: post #17

Auto-play is a tax on the poor with limited data plans.

So true. Just like high definition video or images. This bill should also ban: large hero images, serving more than 500 KB of JavaScript, making more than 50 HTTP calls when loading a page, causing the fans to spin up when loading the page, unnecessarily using web fonts. Banning these things would make the web so much better.

It'd be awesome to have an extremely lightweight protocol that lets you get the size or approximate size of a resource before download. Maybe a new HTTP method like SIZEOF.

But how to make it truthful? Other than client cutting off download at the expressed limit. Would that be good enough? And how to express "fuzzy" sizes like "at least 1MB but might be a little more or less".

Re: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

#80

Post by ahallock »

The government has nothing better to do priority-wise than regulate UI/UX behaviors like video autoplay? This is not essential to the functioning of society; it's bureaucrats avoiding the real issues. Also, ironic coming from the party that is ostensibly for less government intrusion.
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