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You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

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Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#191

Post by pushrax »

dragontamer wrote: post #125
pushrax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. When there's a looping video below the fold, I'd rather start it with a click, instead of having to watch it up to twice just to see the clip from beginning to end.

Then click the button to replay the clip from the beginning if that really is your problem. But you won't. Because the clips are 5 to 20 seconds long. So its faster to just wait for the loop than even to move your hand to the mouse.

I will seek when the option is presented. It’s either tiny or nonexistent though (e.g. for gifs, or if the author didn’t enable the video controls, which default to disabled in many browsers). I’m happiest when a video loads paused, and has a giant play button on it.

How are you scrolling? When I’m browsing and reading my hand lives on the mouse. On mobile it’s even easier to click to play. In either case, clicking on a video takes less than 1 second.

I do agree that extremely short loops can be a different story, but 20 seconds is by far over that time for me. 5 seconds is around the threshold.

I’m sure this preference varies by person.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#192

Post by pabs3 »

grishka wrote: post #153
rstat1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.

I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for and elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.

uMatrix can do that, but it is unmaintained. uBlock Origin uses the same engine as it and probably can do that too.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#193

Post by sdoering »

inetknght wrote: post #148
gruez wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> articles with scrolling effects That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing

In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling.

It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories.

And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho.

I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#194

Post by pjmlp »

grishka wrote: post #187
onion2k wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.

That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".

Easy, install Edge.

https://therecord.media/microsoft-silently-enables-super-dup...

Although I guess this isn't the answer you're looking for.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#195

Post by [deleted] »

yellowapple wrote: post #22

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load . Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user…

[deleted]

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#196

Post by pjmlp »

waltbosz wrote: post #88

How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days. You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al. Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites. The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites know…

In theory, in practice videos can be rendered on the fly into image or canvas elements, either via JavaScript or WebAssembly. :)

Or even better, endless server stream for an animated gif.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#197

Post by Blackthorn »

sdoering wrote: post #190
Blackthorn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse. It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and w…

For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month. But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts. A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month. But as privacy intrusive advertising bec…

> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.

I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.

Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#199

Post by zrm »

rozab wrote: post #36
jjbinx007 wrote: post #11

It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first. You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and…

BBC management has gone down the horrible path of mimicking social media companies because they think that's the modern thing to do. But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.

This is a common theme with non-profits and open source projects. They see the for-profit incumbents doing something toxic and cargo cult it like not providing a similar experience would betray the users when it's really the opposite.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#200

Post by wruza »

zrm wrote: post #189
grishka wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".

Or just have browsers disable javascript by default and require explicit permission to use it. 90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.

Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.
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