News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by danso on Friday September 15, 2017 @11:37AM (#15258000)
Autoplay seems to be something universally reviled and yet the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-...

> During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”

> *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people.”

Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.

Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by nhtaoe78th2 on Friday September 15, 2017 @01:54PM (#15259200)
Facebook's motivation is not that users of the site want it. It's that when they autoplay it they get to lie to advertisers and claim that "users engaged with the video content for x seconds," and charge them accordingly.

Every person I see using Facebook scrolls past the vast majority of videos in their feed as fast as they can because they don't want it to start playing. And then when they do find one they want to play, it's this race to pause the video and rewind it to the beginning as they make it full screen and start it over so they can see the whole thing. Then at the end, they have to stop the auto-scrolling to the next one so they can go back and see the funny part they liked, or whatever. It's so ridiculous.

Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by rhizome on Friday September 15, 2017 @04:13PM (#15260391)
the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it

I don't think that's what they're saying.

“As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”

Sure, when you watch a video you expect sound. That has nothing to do with autoplay, or expectations about websites in general. They're only answering the question they wished was asked, and consequently, people get played when they have the same interpretation as you did.

Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by drewg123 on Friday September 15, 2017 @01:19PM (#15258909)
I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN effectively, so I've just given up on them.
Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by astronautjones on Friday September 15, 2017 @08:46PM (#15262065)
They're really bad about it. But I recently discovered that they offer this service:

http://lite.cnn.io/en

I really wish washington post, nyt, etc would offer something similar, and really miss the days where everyone had wap versions available

Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by lamontcg on Friday September 15, 2017 @01:49PM (#15259161)
Newsweek's autoplay is literally cancer. I've got the disable HTML5 autoplay, but the newsweek site is so aggressive about autoplaying that it bugs out the browser.
Re:Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound by drewg123 on Friday September 15, 2017 @03:39PM (#15260119)
The "just read" chrome extension seems to work pretty well at stopping media playback for Newsweek.