> What went wrong there?

nothing out of the ordinary, probably some team had to increase some company wide KPI of engagement, and likely every team has their own spin on it.

it was ab tested and provided statistically significant increase on video engagement, which was likely defined as "people interacting with the player", in the end you see a chart with engagement growing due to experiment x,y,z.. and everybody is happy and convinced they are doing the right thing.

Advertisement is a cancer. It is time we forbid it instead of making it fund every website in existence.

It will end only when there is a viable alternative and as of now there is none.

What about all the projects being posted lately (quid, Mozilla with scroll, brave Browser, etc)?

I think the friction of getting started, both as creator and as contributor is still too high. I created a proof of concept site about this as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20448087), but I don't think that's an ideal solution either, just maybe a little easier to get started. Any feedback is welcome, of course.

There will be a viable alternative the day advertisement is gone.

There will be thousands of startups rushing to fill the gap.

Or you could spend $65 on a raspberry pi and install pi-hole. Then a huge amount of advertising and tracking never gets accessed and everything goes faster. This is a little more pragmatic then expecting all advertising to go away.

All you have to do is pay ALL the websites you visit and it'll go away...

I would be fine with paying them the amount they get from the advertisement they show me.

Force banks to accept micro-payments (In 2019, for God's sake! That's not rocket science! That's a database transaction!) and I'd be fine with it.

Is there any way to search the internet except for all the advertising supported sites?

Is that even a dark pattern? Surely that's just outright lying.

There is a user interface pattern that predominates these days, where a view/page will be loading/changing, and it will reflow between when you click/tap and when that is processed, causing an incorrect response. Sometimes I get caught in a loop, where I try to select something repeatedly and every time it jumps just as I choose it.

I always thought that was incompetence and not malice, but maybe apparent interface glitches are a significant profit center.

Messing with autoplaying videos (or fonts) in the most deliberate annoying way is not uncommon currently. My hypothese is that they want people to quit the web as fast as they can to increase the number of visits with the less expensive computers/bandwidth possible. Maybe also splitting the events in two or three (many short visits by the same people instead a longer one) to fake an increase in the counter of visits.

This happens on espn.com as well

With NoScript blocking the javascript, there is no auto-playing video at all.

I'm not sure the crowd here is technical enough to use your advice. Or at least that's my conclusion after seeing this same whining thread on every. single. submission.