It’s insane that a certain demographic responds positively to overstimulation, affirming these choices.

I’m an avid cooker and I fucking hate the auto play video on serious eats.

I like to think the people reading that content are not as susceptible to annoying webpages but I think I am wrong.

Analytics don’t provide context. My wife hates autoplay videos and those “blog posts” that now appear before all the recipes. Unfortunately turning off the video and having to scroll around trying to find the recipe is increasing her “engagement”.

Recipes can't be copyrighted and are basically undifferentiated. I suspect the resulting strategy is to try to hook you with the commentary, so that you like or relate to the author, making future visits more likely.

The relevant metrics would be things like returning visitors, not necessarily time on site or clicks on "mute".

The problem isn't so much that videos autoplay.

The problem is that there's no way for people to set it to "off" as an option, and that any time this option is suggested or implemented someone will see how they can override it, because "people don't really want to block the videos our our site".

I set up a whole separate style with Stylus to get rid of the autoplay videos on Serious Eats. Also fixed up their site in a couple other ways as well.

You can block autoplay on Firefox without having to use any extensions.

I have ADHD and discovering that setting was a godsend. It's definitely reduced the number of ublock origin rules I've had to create.

about:config

media.autoplay.enabled = false

If it's an embedded video that sits there waiting for me to click it to play, it may actually get a chance of being viewed. If it starts playing and distracts me, then chances are I will just click the Back button.

It was surprising to me that disabling JS not only keeps most sites usable, but significantly improves the experience on most "modern" sites.

I've always had JS off by default but one day, many years ago, fell for one of the "you have JavaScript disabled, please enable it for a better experience" banners (on a site that did not need it at all) that you'll see everywhere you go without JS, and tried it on for a moment. The page that was perfectly usable without JS became filled with mounds of ads (with sound!) and all kinds of other distracting moving blinking shit. Selecting text caused more bullshit to appear. Nope. Not falling for that again... Since that time, I've become even more suspicious of sites that ask you to do something and promise a "better experience", and have developed better intuition for when a site actually requires JS (honest-to-God interactive web applications, good ones exist but not many) or just wants to use it to shove more crap down your throat.

I wonder how much of that is some marketing department spamming up the page with google tag manager and not caring about the impact on the design (i.e they block the ads themselves or never read the site on mobile).

Most of the worst web UX I’ve ever seen has been through browsing a news site in landscape mode on a mobile. You’re lucky if you can actually read anything at all with the sticky headers, popup banners, modals that don’t fit the screen and break scrolling, and floating videos.

Or a marketing department worked with an agency.

Not representing my company, etcetera, but some agency ours used turned on all the default settings, and rarely goes back to turn off trackers for campaigns they're no longer running. When someone in house was managing he had only turned on what was required, and cleaned up old campaigns.

I also worked with a user Friday who had noticed links via emails were no longer working. Turned out ublock/Firefox was stopping at the iContact tracking URL. She wasn't sure who to report it to, and wasn't using iContact for her emails, so sat on it until she ran into it when we were meeting.

Based on personal experience, marketing groups usually use whatever their IT department approves, and if they're managed, certain browser settings are being pushed to whitelist these based upon users saying things aren't working. Easier to just push a setting than explain best practices.

More likely they just never read the site in the first place.

The best is when I start reading an article, make it to the second page, and then it starts autoplaying. Now I have to scroll back to the top to shut it off.

NoScript solved this problem for me.