For anyone who is asking why sites are pushing auto playing videos, this is why. Google is actively pushing video to "increase engagement". All of those "news" sites have a Google Ads rep that tells them increase engagement equals more ad revenue, so they maximize it to the hilt. It becomes the overriding force UX be damned.

This was fraud perpetrated by Facebook. https://twitter.com/ConroyForReal/status/1052403439613829120 Not saying Google didn't do it too, but I know for sure Facebook was lying.

Oh no doubt.

Nothing repels my engagement more than a video on a news site, following my scrolling while I'm reading.

Aren't auto playing videos blocked by default in Chrome now? https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

No. The Autoplay chrome flag was added but then removed/scrapped sometime in early 2019. You can only stop autoplay videos by using extensions now. The only extension that is actively maintained (and actually works) is called "AutoplayStopper" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoplaystopper/ej...

That's not actually what's going on. You can find an explanation here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/web-audio-...

There's no flag; it's on by default. Do you have a link to an article talking about the autoplay policy being reverted?

No, I am speaking by my own use of Chrome only. Go to YouTube or any large news site, and the videos still autoplay, regardless of whatever chrome settings/flags are now supposedly default.

No, but I can confirm that in FF69 it's finally blocking those banal CNN videos that seem to accompany every. single. article.

They've switched to checking an "mei" score to see if a video is allowed to autoplay on a site:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

It is blocked only if the video has sound. Muted videos can be played automatically.

Whether I agree with a video-heavy web or not (I don't), I have to commend this for explaining the <video> tag in very clear steps.

Video has it's place for-sure, but I can't stand seeing it on news websites. So much data must be wasted on sending this junk down the pipe nobody looks at.

Videos are great when I'm actively seeking them out, which is a decent percentage of my overall Web usage.

It's when I'm not actively seeking them out that they annoy me.

The h264 and h265 files are named incorrectly in their example causing confusion.

  <source src="myh264Video.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="hvc1"'>
  <source src="myh265Video.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1"'>

myh264Video.mp4 should be avc1 codec...

Video is highly engaging, and moving images are very useful. I wanted to include videos in an electronic book, but it turned out that auto-playing videos are too interesting and they ruin the flow. Instead, I ended up playing the videos frame by frame according to scroll position. The effect is pretty neat: https://goeiebook.ca/story/bussing/

We need a new type of browser that only understands minimal HTML and doesn't allow script execution. Something entirely document-centric. There has to be a way to put the genie back in the bottle.

How is this anti-javascript sentiment relevant to an article about the `<video>` tag?

You don't a need type of browser for this. Just use NoScript.

PDFs mostly fulfill this.

I'm aware they can have scripts and such, but people expect PDFs to be static documents and not applications.

They really don't, since they don't reflow. Viewing a PDF paper on a phone, for example, is a nightmare because you have to zoom in and out and pan around to even be able to read the text.

>There has to be a way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Only an extreme minority of people, even within the tech community, wish the web were limited only to static, minimally formatted hypertext. Not even the people who created HTML and the glorious "old web" had such a limited vision of it in mind.

You mean an old type of browser? That's like, where we started.

try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638

Gopher

"Research shows that websites with video lead to higher engagement and sales."

That "Research shows" link is pretty thin on actual research. Anybody have any links to something more substantial than a questionable A/B test run by a single company?

A single website cannot compete with giants.

A friendly nerd cannot put the time into multimedia and SEO.

Commerce giants win. And those companies have fake social media users astroturfing.

Maybe blogs should be more accepted.

I don't know why you've been flagged and downvoted. Though your argument could use some more effort and articulation, this sentiment is certainly growing amongst engineers and a certain subset of the internet population. You're not alone in feeling this.

The old internet didn't have real money and power behind it (outside of research and pure business technologists), but now that the Internet is where the eyes of the world are, all of that influence has crept in and is seemingly here to stay.

It's hard to fight back against entities that are thousands of times more equipped than you.

>Maybe blogs should be more accepted.

There was such a time, but that was when blogs primarily were forms of personal expression, rather than professional pseudo-magazines integrated into social media silos competing for clicks. People would just put up a site and post about the minutiae of their day. Most of it was stupid and pointless, but they might sometimes provide an interesting window into someone else's life. And that was fine because blogs weren't competing against anyone.

Now we get a lot more content through social media, but so much less context. Even Medium is almost entirely people trying to get viral and raise their visibility to potential employers.

You're right - you can't win that game. The only way to win is not to play.