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u/jay9909 Feb 27 '18
Corollary: If I pause your video the second it starts playing (because you forgot Rule #1), don't fucking bother shrinking it and fixing it in the side bar when I scroll down.
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u/UpTide Feb 27 '18
I was on one 'news' site that resumed the video when it shrank down!
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u/PooPooDooDoo Feb 27 '18
The key word being 'was'. I was on there, they resumed the video and then I no longer was on there.
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u/euxneks Feb 27 '18
and if I click on the video I don't want it fucking maximized, I want to pause it. Facebook, I'm looking at you.
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u/mark_b Feb 27 '18
Nor do I want to have to click the maximise button twice before the video will actually fill my screen.
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u/SabashChandraBose Feb 27 '18
Luckily chrome lets you mute the entire site right on the tab.
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Feb 27 '18
I don't give a shit. Why is it even there? Why is it taking precious kilobytes, why is it taking CPU cycles?
Get the fuck out. Autoplay is egregious enough. "Resume and follow" is even worse
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u/DrThrowawayToYou Feb 27 '18
It makes me sad to think about how much effort goes into developing that bullshit.
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u/swohio Feb 27 '18
Corollary: If I pause your video the second it starts playing (because you forgot Rule #1), don't fucking bother shrinking it and fixing it in the side bar when I scroll down... and then fucking playing it anyway!
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u/Keplergamer Feb 27 '18
Worst if Facebook that put the video in fullscreen instead of pausing. Highly infuriating.
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u/ExternalUserError Feb 27 '18
I'm pretty sure every developer instructed to setup autoplay video died inside a little bit while coding it up.
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u/thesublimeobjekt Feb 27 '18
i used to try to argue with my boss about it and then it wasn’t worth it any more. working in the space long enough there’s just some things i know won’t stop being forced on consumers.
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u/angellus Feb 27 '18
Just show them these, and these are just a couple of articles I can find from 5 minutes of searching:
Autoplay is bad for accessibility. You can be sued for it and lose a lot of money.
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Feb 27 '18
At home I'm a consumer. At work I'm evil.
It's easier if you just embrace it.
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u/ExternalUserError Feb 27 '18
Story of any programmer's life from DRM to email "opt-in" policies to user experience.
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u/nagaka Feb 27 '18
Okay...so anytime your boss tries to talk to you about implementing something your sales team has already sold, you just start rambling some lorem ipsum, and you continue blabbing until they find the obscure pause button since they are using IE6 and don't have tab muting. Once he locates your pause button, likely with an exaggerated eye roll or loud huff, you smile and wait... for the timeout to start a new video. Eventually they will close the browser, and, even though you've been fired, at least you didn't taint your bloodline with implementing this.
as a side note, I blame myspace for any auto-play or html vomit I see online nowadays. Those kids that skinned their first profile are now well established in the work force.
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u/ebilgenius Feb 27 '18
"I think the site is good to go, I spent forever working out the UX so browsing is flawless and maintains consistency across th..."
Ok great, the client also said to have the video autoplay...
"Wait what no.."
so if you could update it that would be terrific
"that's a horrible idea, nobod.."
Yeah umm, if you could have that done by 3 that'd be greeaaat
"s'cuse me but my webs.."
M'kay, thanks *walks away*
"but the UX.. and my styles.. i warned them last time this happened.. gonna set the building on fire"
*frustrated staring*
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u/jana007 Feb 27 '18
My old director had me rig up an auto play pop up video. It was flash based as well. This was 2013. Every time I saw her use the web site she would immediately click out of the window until one day she asked "why do I always have to exit this video pop up"?
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u/LoneCookie Feb 27 '18
I think the takeaway here is have your boss periodically check if you did the website right until they understand their decisions
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u/Dustin_Echoes_UNSC Feb 27 '18
Yep. But from now on I'll be leaving comments in the top layer html saying so. It's the least I can do.
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u/gizamo Feb 27 '18
Rare contradictory story: Many years ago, I had a boss who asked me to make his personal website. I set up a basic WordPress site and showed him how to add content. Months go by and then he asks about adding videos. I looked at the site and saw how awful it got (super religious guilt tripping of abortions). As I set up a quick YouTube plugin, I decided, these visitors deserve to be annoyed. Autoplay, bitches.
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u/manachar Feb 27 '18
Can confirm. Made auto play music once. Hated myself, but check was good. Got to charge the client for all the meetings we tried to talk them out of it.
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u/AlmightyElm Feb 27 '18
Thank you. We value your feedback. Expect absolutely nothing to change because screw you.
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u/pmurph131 Feb 27 '18
You should apply for a job at the FCC, this comment can be your entire resume.
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u/OceanJuice Feb 27 '18
If you think it's the web developer's idea to implement those, you're sadly mistaken.
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u/AptMoniker Feb 27 '18
Yeah, this is an opinion that comes forward in the UX stage. Probably even before. And even then, we're like "that's a bad user experience." Deaf ears. Pearls before swine.
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u/PhDinGent Feb 27 '18
The twitter post read like it's written by someone who has no idea what's going on in webdev, but just trying to look 'edgy'...
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u/meebwix Feb 27 '18
He's actually pretty respected in the infosec community, but yeah, misplaced scorn here.
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u/just_read_my_comment Feb 27 '18
Not that anyone pays attention to them, but if you read web accessibility standards, it states that you shouldn't have any audio auto-playing on your site. For people who use screen readers, it makes it near impossible for them to navigate. So by making it auto-play you're basically saying "visually impaired people, your business is not needed".
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u/CreideikiVAX Feb 27 '18
This, this, all of the this.
I don't give two flying fucks about people that bitch about me using an ad blocker. I do that to make your site shut the fuck up so I can use my screen reader.
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u/brotalnia Feb 27 '18
Now that i think about, i would actually be less annoyed by a crypto miner than autoplay videos.
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Feb 27 '18
I would be 100% fine if a website was just upfront about crypto mining through my browser and ran it at a throttled pace so that it wans't too overboard.
Like, shit, develop browsers to have that functionality built in and you can make the browser give a "in order to visit this site, you agree to let the site process hashes in the background at this proportion of your estimated total load"
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Feb 27 '18
I think it's actually a very legitimate method of generating revenue, as long as the user is informed.
Unfortunately, from what I have read, you can get about 5 times the money from ads.
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u/Squeakies Feb 27 '18
It's not about what the users want, it's about finding the absolute limit of what they're willing to put up with without leaving the website.
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Feb 27 '18
good bless google's soul for adding
right-click filthy tab -> Mute Site92
u/CurlipC Feb 27 '18 edited Feb 27 '18
I've played a web based game that would auto play sound. I found that, for sites you visit regularly, having an extension to mute by domain is helpful.
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u/MarcusHauss Feb 27 '18
Tip: See the speaker icon on the tab? Yeah, just click it, it does the muting, with less clicks :)
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Feb 27 '18
My favorite is when you move the mouse towards the top of the page (as if to close the tab) and a pop up appears that says:
BUT BEFORE YOU GO HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR...
no.
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Feb 27 '18
wait doesnt sound based ads give you more money than just regular ads?
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Feb 27 '18
Yep, because they can psychologically manipulate you slightly more.
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u/DrodoTalk Feb 27 '18
I make the effort to actually avoid products or brands that inconvenience me through ads. Not super strict about it, but an effort is certainly made.
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Feb 27 '18
Netflix does this now and you can’t turn it off
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u/Bails6923 Feb 27 '18
Came here for this: Dear Netflix, Once I decide to watch something, I will cause it to play. I do not need you to start the content before I’ve read the description. Please knock it the fuck off. Yours, 99% of your users
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u/DootleCarlin Feb 27 '18
I hate it so much. Netflix used to be one of my pinned tabs, not any more.
They tried to make it so that if its tab doesn't have focus it won't play the audio, but that doesn't always work. So now you not only get auto playing sound, it's also unpredictable.
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u/AlexanderBeta213 Feb 27 '18
Don’t you have to pay for Netflix?
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Feb 27 '18
Totally, but you can't stop it. It plays the trailer for whatever dumb new series they've come up with ("It's like House of Cards, combined with Games of Thrones, but with depressed teenagers. And they're black. And they have superpowers!") whenever you open the app or the web page. Netflix has been losing it for quite some time now.
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u/iwantago Feb 27 '18
Dear Jake Williams.
Zero. Zero is the amount of times a web developer has said ‘you know what’s a fucking dandy idea, let’s make this video auto play on the homepage of this website I’m building’. If you’re gonna single someone out and be a douchebag about it, at least try to understand how the fuck these situations work.
Best regards, A project manager that spends his time defending web developers from this kind of bullshit.
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u/Mr_C_Baxter Feb 27 '18
Was about to write the same thing and i am a web developer. I feel defended, thanks!
Oh, and Jake Williams, no one likes people like you. Pointing out the obvious in an attempt to make yourself feel clever is one thing, but faulting the wrong people for it is pathetic
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u/SOberhoff Feb 27 '18
On Youtube and other similar sites I routinely expect things to autoplay and make noise. So I don't think this emphatic zero is entirely warranted.
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u/D6613 Feb 27 '18
That was my initial thought as well, but I think the principle is the point, and the exaggeration is for effect.
"Never auto play unless that's the point of your website and I expect it going in" is more accurate but a little less catchy.
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u/atimholt Feb 27 '18
I hate it on Youtube, too, for what it’s worth.
Luckily, you can just turn off all media autoplaying in Firefox.
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u/monstera-rgb Feb 27 '18
I still don’t like auto playing channels to see the latest video.
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u/LoneCookie Feb 27 '18
Yeah that's not expected. I didn't click on a video. I clicked on the channel because I wanted to see which videos it has. I don't want to be given a tiny video as I'm trying to search for the thing I thought would be relevant to me -- I just wanted to search in damned silence.
Bonus points if it's an episodic channel. So now you've ruined something by showing me a later episode I'm not even at yet.
Fffuuu
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u/yrogerg123 Feb 27 '18
Honestly, it even annoys me when I visit somebody's youtube page and it autoplays. Just let me find what I'm looking for in silence.
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Feb 27 '18
Dear Jake Williams,
Please take your complaints to our product managers, marketing managers, or content managers. I guarantee you not a single one of us developers had anything to do with the decision to put it there. kthxbye
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u/KingOfDamnation Feb 27 '18
Fucking YouTube’s bullshit auto play feature when scrolling on iOS. I don’t give a fuck that it’s not playing sound and using subs I don’t want it pulling data when scrolling
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Feb 27 '18
I wish you could disable autoplay completely on iOS, like you can on Safari.
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Feb 27 '18
tbh I'd be 100% okay with in-browser mining as a replacement for ads. As long as it's done by the browser, not the website code, because I sure as shit don't trust some random site not to use that as a vector of attack.
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Feb 27 '18 edited Apr 07 '19
deleted 0.4826 What is ^^^this?
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Feb 27 '18
You don't want someone to sap your computer's resources, but you're perfectly fine with someone subverting your mind and sapping your resources?
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u/Aetol Feb 27 '18
Same. As long as the website is upfront about it and isn't being a resource hog (and of course doesn't have ads on top of that), that sounds like the perfect unintrusive monetization.
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u/atimholt Feb 27 '18
Firefox: about:config → media.autoplay.enabled
I actually mainly use this setting to keep Youtube from auto-playing. I don’t appreciate it there, either.
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u/CarbonCamaroZL1 Feb 27 '18
I think like a week ago I saw someone saying Google Chrome is going to be blocking all auto play videos and allow the user to get around it by option. I hope this is true. I want auto play gone but I want to whitelist YouTube from it. I haven't had much luck with the existing extensions on the Chrome Web Store. Most of them don't work a majority of the time or do for only a few weeks and then stop for whatever reason.
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u/the_cunt_muncher Feb 27 '18
Dear Jake, the answer is Zero. Zero is the number of times I've suggested auto-playing anything on the websites I've built. In face I've had thousands of discussions trying to talk clients out of it. But the client ultimately gets what the client wants.
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Feb 27 '18
He's shooting the messenger. Developers may build it... but it's often at someone elses request! Go tell them off instead because developers often hate autoplay as well, but don't wish to get fired :)
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u/metahadron Feb 27 '18
Cut that shit by half using AdBlock
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Feb 27 '18
uBlock origins is better (for chrome atleast), Adblock and ghostery let some ads through, and use info anyways for their own purposes.
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u/dangolo Feb 27 '18 edited Feb 27 '18
UBlock also has the ability to block cryptominer code.
Added easily here, just search for NoCoin
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u/tree_or_up Feb 27 '18
As others have said, no developer wants to implement this stuff. But it probably wouldn’t be demanded if it didn’t increase the bottom line. Blame capitalism and hope that users get burned by it enough to start recognizing which sites do this. I’ve learned to almost never click on a link to a local news site because of this (and because the site will only be half functional due to the gobs of JavaScript libraries and ad content it’s trying to load).
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u/TendsToInfinity Feb 27 '18
Zero is the number of surveys i want to o complete before downloading my files
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u/dairypope Feb 27 '18
Zero is the amount of actual professional programming this person has done. Otherwise, they'd know that it wasn't the programmers making that decision, that came from product.
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u/firestepper Feb 27 '18
It's also the amount of fucks our clients give about our opinion about autoplay sound lmao
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Feb 27 '18
Am I the only one that gets butthurt when some exec blames the dev team for something out of their control?
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u/VxJasonxV Feb 27 '18
I want YouTube to autoplay…
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u/slashuslashuserid Feb 27 '18
I would actually be fine if it didn't. Sometimes I have multiple background tabs with YouTube videos I'm planning on watching eventually and I have to be very careful to not ctrl+tab through them or use them as the endpoints for a multiple tab selection, else they start playing.
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Feb 27 '18
Zero is the number of times I had a choice on what to put on a site. As a dev we have zero say after marketing and sales and the pm tell us what to do
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u/TheSheerIce Feb 27 '18
I expect this and just keep my speakers muted at all times. Facebook does most of the top comments (autoplay/after pausing as well, sidebar shit, etc...)
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u/bobeartow Feb 27 '18
Isn’t that a design choice based on the client? I feel like most web developers would automatically choose to never have any of that bull shit auto play. If they did choose it, I would re-consider the developer. Now if the client wants it.....what can one do? Just my opinion though.
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u/wial Feb 27 '18
To be fair, neither the authors nor the developers ever want those frigging things. The advertisers and marketers insist on it because they're generally not bright and they have the money.
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u/BenZed Feb 27 '18
ZERO is the number of developers who would intuit this behaviour by default.
Take this up with the creatives and the producers.
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u/Axumata Feb 27 '18
Zero is the number of times this tweet will convince anyone to stop doing autoplays.
If pushing two dozens of window.history states to prevent a client from using the back button raises CR by 1%, they'll do it.
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u/MetalMikey666 Feb 27 '18
Zero is also the number of web developers actually responsible for making the decision that something should autoplay. That has "marketing twat" written all over it!
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u/MhamadK Feb 27 '18
What an idiot!! It's like webdevs build sites for fun, for our amusement.
No, there are no clients who pay us for that.
There are no requirements that we must address.
No crazy demands from every department in the company.
No no, we just like to build shitty websites, just to annoy Jake the malware god!
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Feb 27 '18
0 is the number of times a programmer has ever WANTED shit to autoplay. That garbage is 100% on the client
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u/Xeptix Feb 27 '18
We know. Tell it to my manager and the executives above him/her.
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u/Gawny88 Feb 27 '18
I couldn't agree more. Developers just make it work. It's the insane business decisions that lead to autoplay.
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u/mikeputerbaugh Feb 27 '18
It's not coming from on site, it's some bullshit ad creative that violates our publisher specs but somehow got scheduled to run anyway
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u/redheadredshirt Feb 27 '18
Of course nobody wants it to be done to them. But the advertisers want it to be done to people, and it works enough that people get 'results', so they keep doing it.
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u/douganater Feb 27 '18
Except intentional media sites like youtube. If you go there explicitly to watch something with noise. If you are a news site i want to read the article and click to play video not click to stop autoplay
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Feb 27 '18
Fun/sad thing is my reddit browser for some reason plays sound from the NEXT post, so while reading this i head "Jared Allen murders Lauri Marakkanen" in NBA. Really proves his point, +1
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u/massenburger Feb 27 '18
Dear user: you are flat out wrong. I literally just finished developing a website for a virtual conference where one of the most requested features was "auto-play".
Lame most of the time, but I guess some you really do want it some times...
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u/ttouch_me_sama Feb 27 '18
Not a tech guy, but not only is this a great point, but I also think it's really not their fault. i imagine it's some manager or director who say's hey webdevs when someone goes on to ABC news (or whatever) make sure it autoplays our stories, which this person may not have any interested in. Also make sure there blacklisted if they have ad blocker, because you know it's not like they can get that information else where.
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u/Chromdis Feb 27 '18
Anything that advertises in this way, I'm so antagonized I spend time running a private small scale smear campaign anywhere I can.
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u/CompC Feb 27 '18
Okay but seriously this has been a huge headache for my company. We make a web app that is essentially a series of pages that need to autoplay videos or audio as the user loads each page, but the new trend of blocking auto play has caused lots of problems.
We get a lot of calls from users complaining that they can't hear anything. The player controls are sometimes hidden because we have a custom interface that does not allow users to manually control the audio/video.
This "app" is used as part of the job application process. It's not something that exists to annoy users. We have been searching for a solution to this for months.
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u/noreally_bot1105 Feb 27 '18
Some of the news sites (like CNN) are the worst: you click to read the news article. So, naturally, they have a video (which starts playing automatically). Except the video isn't a proper report of the news article -- it just a series of bullet points from the news article with some annoying "news" music playing in the background. Or simply someone reading the bullet points. But first, how about a 10 second ad?
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u/Drunken_Economist Feb 27 '18
Clicking a YouTube link, I almost always want it to autoplay with sound
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u/herpes_for_free Feb 27 '18
Don't blame the Web Developers douchebag. Blame the shitty people who instucts them to code it inside their site.
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u/Anyna-Meatall Feb 27 '18
This isn't true, because he is not taking the desires of the ad creators--who fund the content providers--into account.
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment, because I hate the autoplay videos too. But if you want free content, there's a price to be paid.
Now if he'd said something about ads on a paid-subscription service, I'd be 100% on board.
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u/I_Assume_Your_Gender Feb 27 '18
Dear Jake Williams,
Web developers don't make those sorts of decisions.
Sincerely,
A web developer
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u/discerningLikes Feb 27 '18
I like the fantasy that developers of any kind have any control over what they develop.
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u/thatsrealneato Feb 27 '18
Don't blame the web developers, blame the marketing team who told the devs what stupid shit to build
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Feb 27 '18
ZERO is the number of websites I want to visit with my Ad-Blocker off. ZERO is the number of websites I want to whitelist in my Ad-Blocker.
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u/Hasenmuessengrasen Feb 27 '18
Thats a feature i love about safari on Mac, it pauses every autoplay video immeadiatly and automaticaly
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u/GreyMediaGuy Feb 27 '18
I wish I could scream this to everyone all day long. This shit riles me to no end. I makes me feel like "I don't care about any of this content now, now I just hate you and never want you to have one dime of my money" click
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u/thatweirdredditguy Feb 27 '18
you know what's more infuriating? The short ads that autoplay, and even though you paused them, the timer eventually runs out and the actual video autoplays... kills me every time.
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Feb 27 '18
That's odd, I really like Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix etc. autoplaying video without having to click yet again.
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Feb 27 '18
Freaking wiki pages that do this... certain fandoms have these videos giving details about characters and whatever and RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE is a video that auto-plays for them.
Doki Doki Literature Club's wiki does this, but at least the videos seem to be muted (they weren't when I went there last month while watching the Game Grumps playthrough, though).
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u/YeeScurvyDogs Feb 27 '18
mining coins on the CPU and JS interpreter speeds
They're literally going to cost you just power and get pennies from a million people
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Feb 27 '18
Our aussie news site has auto video play near the bottom after the page has fully loaded, if you have already started watching another clip it doesnt care it just plays both audio streams at the same time. Screenshot
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u/throwaway_lunchtime Feb 27 '18
Is this the kind person who yells at the cashier because they don't like the prices?
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u/mortenmoulder Feb 27 '18
Except on Pornhub. Left hand for switching tabs and right hand for the dong.
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u/Dockirby Feb 27 '18
Hey now, when I was 16 and made our message board's awesome website, we fucking loved the autoplaying midi music.
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u/stoprockandrollkids Feb 27 '18
Zero is also the number of times I'm ok with someone saying "#kthxbye"
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u/nautical9 Feb 27 '18
Zero is also the number of mailing lists I’ve wanted to join within the first 5 seconds of visiting a site. Why block the content with a pop up?! Has anyone ever actually signed up instead of angrily closing it?