141–150 of 318 posts
If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor. It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…
I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor. It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.
This is what Google has been trying to figure out forever isn't it? Things like the automagic answers block at the top of the search results, google assistant, etc. Unfortunately we aren't very good at making robot butlers yet, and copyright severely limits what they can do (provided they are running as a third party service) in the first place.
Is the point of the video to make users stay longer? How long do they need the user to stay in order to improve their ad profit. Here is an idea, obnoxious webmasters: add an interstitial timer, "your article will be ready in ...". It's less intrusive and i might even tolerate that if it's less than ... 9 seconds. I m sorry that google and FB are sucking up all your revenue, i d like to help
So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.
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Not sure why you are downvoted. Animated gifs are huge in comparison. One thing to note, however, is that it must be without sound. Auto playing sound of any sort is complete garbage.
> Not sure why you are downvoted. Because auto-playing motion is something I should be able to disable. It distracts me and I don’t want it. Ever.
I'm not going to change my writing / guide style just because some people outside of those gaming communities don't like the way they work. Its one thing if you were the target audience, its a totally different thing if you're just a meta-commentator talking about the internet in general.
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I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in…
> any site that use custom playback controls will break Is that actually a bad thing? I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible. Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on. And even if I'm wrong, and cust…
obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any site that use custom playback controls will break Is that actually a bad thing? I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible. Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on. And even if I'm wrong, and cust…
>why should they be supported for any event except onclick? obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-... ), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback…
That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing
How about an opt in botnet extension for your browser that focuses it's energy on sites with this sort of dark pattern behaviour. i.e. You install the extension, when you come across a site like this you vote it for getting punishment, once the site gets enough vote the botnet occasionally focusses it's energy on the site in question when the participants browser is otherwise sitting idle. The punishment could potent…
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.
Yes, but unlikely. Its usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.