12mo ago

Does ANYONE like autoplaying videos on news sites / articles?

In today’s fast-paced digital world, we often rely on various online platforms to quench our thirst for knowledge, information, and entertainment. Among these platforms, news websites hold a significant position as they allow us to stay updated about current events across the globe. However, despite their essential role in delivering crucial content, many of these sites have resorted to irritating tactics that negatively impact user experience. One such tactic is the automatic playback of videos accompanied by full audio when one opens their webpage.

This practice has become increasingly common among news sites due to the belief that users prefer a multimedia experience over plain text articles. However, there is no empirical evidence to support this assumption. On the contrary, many have raised concerns over these autoplaying videos. These concerns range from audio intrusion into private spaces, lack of control over sound output, to the consumption of data and battery life on mobile devices. The most prominent criticism against this practice stems from the mismatch between the video’s subject matter and the article itself. In other words, these videos are unrelated to the content of the page and often serve solely as advertisements, disruptive interfaces, or attempts at misleading engagement metrics.

Does ANYONE actually like these videos? I typically scramble to find the close and/or mute button as soon as I can. Infuriating.

64 comments

It's the sort of thing that gets decided in a weekly meeting where some dipshit in middle management says "Guys, we need more engagement. Can we force them to watch a video? Is that possible? Seems like that should be possible." Then some long-suffering coder has to admit that yeah, it's possible. Then the coder then mumbles that it's also a bad idea and very obnoxious, and that most users will just mute it or leave the page...but the manager douchebag doesn't even hear it, because he's already patting himself on the back for his 'brilliant innovation'.
- Meanwhile the real question is why major browsers don't seem to have a "do not ever fucking make a noise unless I explicitly tell you to" setting. I swear, Chrome and IE look like they do, but it never seems to actually work. And then there's "this setting is managed by your administrator" bullshit on top of that...
  
  I feel this way about the "This website would like to send you notifications" popup. I will never, ever click accept on that. Why are you still asking. It's not even embedded in the website, it would be so easy to build a toggle into the browser to blanket reject those requests. Why is this even a """feature""" at all ffs, after email and push notifications and junk mail why do these shitty companies need yet another way to freely spam unwilling consumers. You did not under any circumstances have to hand this to them.
  
  I think firefox's version works properly? At least, I've not noticed it as an issue since switching back to it from Chrome
  
  Not specifically browser settings, but in Windows and Linux you should have access to a per application mixer and can reduce / mute the volume of your browser to zero.

Nope. I uBlock element zap them if they happen to slip through the annoyance filter.
You pause/mute/close it at the top, and the damn thing has the audacity to follow you down as you scroll and resume playing. 😡
- The following is the worst part.

Short answer is no.
Long answer is definitely no.
- Wouldn't the long answer be nooooooooooo!!!
- Medium answer No.
  
  Extra long answer?
  Believe it or not, also no.

I don't know if you've noticed but most of what we see online isn't because we like it, it's because the service provider's greed to shape their metrics into the most profitable results.
Fucking fextralife wiki took over the Souls games not because they are better (they are significantly worse information wise or just copy pasted than/from the fandom versions).
But they gamed their SEO by having autoplay embedded videos in every fuckdamn page so any time someone went to see some info they were giving the site cross engagement and vastly boosting their pagerank.
Deliberate manipulation that google was warned about and basically said "We don't care".
- Also boosted stream viewer numbers. Having 10k viewers despite chat being absolutely dead is just sickening.

I HATE THAT SHIT

I hate it so much infact that I actually remember which sites do it and don't click their links.
Fucking tragedy that "comedy news" websites like the onion and wonkette are actually head and shoulders above "respected" news sites in terms of professionalism.
I could actually see a complete reversal where they become the actual "Paper of record" and people refuse to even wipe their ass with a rag like the times or wapo.

Their advertisers do

It was precisely this crap that got me to switch from AdBlock Plus or other "fair" adblockers that let some unintrusive ads through to support the website, to uBlock origin, because it can remove those stupid auto playing videos.
I didn't like the scorched earth approach of uBO then (and still sometimes now), but any text and/or image based website shoving autoplaying videos down my throat doesn't deserve any support.
P.S. I'd like an optional way to allow unintrusive ads through in uBlock origin per site while still blocking any trackers that are not useless if the ad didn't exist.

I appreciate it in the same way I'd enjoy having an entire cactus jammed up my ass.
Which is to say, no.

Why are you using chatgpt for that content? Don't bring that sh* to lemmy please

No (except on pages that are specifically for a video), and I don’t think the “news” sites autoplay the videos because they think users want it; I think they do it because video ads pay more and it’s an easy way to slip a video ad in, especially as a pre-roll ad.

I loathe it deeply.

I don’t normally comment on anything but I literally have to know: did you use ChatGPT to write the first two paragraphs of your post? I skimmed your last couple posts and I don’t think you’re a bot, but this one and what looks like a battle rap(?) from the perspective of trump just give me major ChatGPT vibes. No judgement either way, I’m just curious if ChatGPT’s out here passing the Turing test lol.
- Haha my brain just automatically skipped those first 2 paragraphs. I had to go back and read them, but they definitely sound like gpt
  
  Well shit, me too. Have we inadvertently trained our brains to ignore walls of garbage text?

No one, ever:
News sites: Let’s autoplay a video when they hit the page!
No one, ever: . . .
News sites: Let’s put more ads in!
- And the volume is always at least the double of whatever i was listening to

Google news is my go to… I’m sure someone can tell me why that’s bad and that I’m stupid ):
I am in the habit of right click, open in new tab… then as that tab is loading, right click the tab and ‘mute tab’.
I’m using Firefox but I’m sure the other browsers have a mute tab function.
I seriously just want to read articles. I don’t want some loud bullshit screaming at me every time I open an article.
- You can set Firefox to block auto-play, even if you open the tab in the foreground, put uBlock origin on top of it and you get rid of most of those annoying videos.
  
  Sweet, I am liking Firefox more and more after making the switch a few months ago
- You can actually set a thing on the tab so it mutes that particular site automatically. It's very cool.
  I happen to use it for the very nerdy purpose of muting the fucking ads after I finish a puzzle on sudoku.net or so, but you may have a more lofty purpose. Hope it works for you as well as it works for me!
- Interesting. I use Google News as well, and I have never had audio play. I tend to use it on mobile, and my default browser on mobile is Firefox. Specifically Firefox in private browser mode, so I don't have to worry about cookies.
  I use Firefox on the desktop as well, but not usually in private mode. I also don't ever have video autoplay that way. I'm not sure why. I don't think I installed any extensions to turn it off, but I might have tweaked the browser settings shortly after installing.
  
  I meant when I click on any of the articles curated by Google news… a lot of the sites that Google news aggregates are sites that auto play videos.

No, that’s why they autoplay.

If I am looking to know about a particular goings on, I will go through the news sites I trust to find the text article. I do not like video on news sites.

Don't like it. However, my phone and notebook are muted at all times. I never get a surprise blast of audio.

No, but I also have autoplay of audio and video off by default

Ugh the only worse thing than that is the popups that beg for your email address the microsecond your mouse leaves the page area.
Whoever figures out how to block that shit would become king of all england
- Or as soon as you scroll down there's a full page pop-up asking you to sign up or some other bullshit.

I hate them too.
I come to news sites to read articles, not watch videos. If I wanted to watch videos I would go to YouTube. It's as simple as that.
Making them autoplay is just adding insult to injury (as well as wasting bandwidth for literally no reason).
Let's do some napkin maths while we think how much energy has been wasted by autoplaying a video for every visitor.
If I were to guess, the video player pre-caches a few seconds of content, maybe up to 10. That's a fair few MB worth of reasonable quality video/audio data. Now multiply that for every single visitor. That's a lot of wasted energy. The page itself is likely ~1MB in size (at least you'd hope), so they're potentially increasing their costs by an order of magnitude by having the videos autoplay.
It's monumentally stupid.

I have heard others complain about it but as long as I have used Firefox videos haven't autoplayed on anything so I would hate if they did that but currently I'm good

Any site that does it will not get a second visit from me. It’s really, REALLY fucking annoying when they do it. Especially for people who keep their volume up in general.

Not here, that's for sure, but keep in mind the community you're asking.

No, but ads on them are more profitable than ads in text.

I especially hate the auto-play in feed thing in the Android YouTube app. Threre's no audio but it makes me feel jumpy and irritable bc I'm not in control. The iOS version has an option to turn it off, which must be an Apple requirement. It makes no sense not to offer the option to YouTube subscribers since we don't see ads. Google is just wasting their bandwidth. Workaround is to start a video and pause it, but that's stupid. Just let me turn the shit off.
Edit: I'm a dumbass and possibly a jackass. They added this at some point. Thanks @pete_the_cat@lemmy.world for setting me straight.
- You can definitely turn that off, or at least I can on my S23. It may be a YouTube Premium feature.
  
  Ok. Show me a screen shot. In the iOS version, the option is called "Playback in feeds" and appears at the bottom of the General section in Settings. This option does not exist in the Android version that I have. As I stated, I am a YouTube subscriber.
  https://imgur.com/a/YQgtzPV

On a related subject, who the fuck signs up for newsletters when that popup blocks your ability to use the website? Who really wants newsletters in the first place? It's all just spam.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-turn-off-autoplay-videos#

Hell no. I thought we established this shit pretty early on with the web when it was just auto playing audio.

I don't like them. I have another question though, what do they benefits from playing it?
- Easy, when they go to sell spots to advertisers: "Look, our video had 15,000 views last week" (except all of them were unwanted)
  
  It's true! I used to sell web ad space for the local newspaper, and it was recommended that we click on all of our local ads when they pop up so at the end of the month we could say "Your ad was so effective, 100 people clicked on it!"
  90 of them were me.
- The MBA who's in charge of their website. See, they heard that video was the future of the web, so they got a ton of budget to add video. But when nobody clicked on the videos they had the brilliant idea to autoplay them, which dramatically increases video viewership, thus justifying their budget.
- Some might put adds in front or at the end of videos. I'm sure the "viewer counts" also help them negotiate rates for adds on the page itself.

Oh not only will I say no I'll go one further. I was looking for chef John's recipe for chicken sausage potato onions but the one pot version. I was hoping to find the YouTube video for it but I couldn't spell the weird name he gave it. It would only give me the baked version. I did a search and found the web page recipe for it.
In the web page it started auto-playing the video that I really wanted to see. It pissed me off and I stopped it because I didn't feel like watching a thumbnail of it without comments or adequate controls. I did an inspect look up the embed ID and left to find it on peer tube.
Sometimes I want to video for something and just to shut my brain off and take it all in. Sometimes I'm looking for an exact piece of information and I just want to skim as little as possible collect the info and move along.
If I want one then they give me the other I'm not amused.

I think it's aimed at older people who are used to channel flipping on cable TV. In other words, mostly boomers, probably some older Gen X.

64 comments

I HATE THAT SHIT