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'.

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. 😡

Short answer is no.

Long answer is definitely 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".

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.

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!

No, that’s why they autoplay.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.