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Comment by nol13 | Hacker News Reader

See just get rid of the auto-playing videos problem solved, and make the world a better place while you're at it.

I bet Facebook gets a decent enough amount from people who scroll, look away for a second, video starts playing, then user pauses video, but not before the 3 second mark.

What really should be done is getting rid of auto playing videos at the HTML spec level. While there are legitimate uses for autoplaying videos (YouTube for example), it has too much potential for abuse by ad networks.

Advertisers will find a workaround and it will inevitably be much worse for the user. In the following talk, someone from the Google Chrome team describes how, when they tried to not autoplay videos on Android, video advertisers worked around the restriction by compiling video codecs to JavaScript and then rendering their video-like ads to an HTML canvas.

https://youtu.be/wQGa_6CRc9I?t=23m52s

That's where NoScript comes in

Or blocking 3rd party scrips with uBlock.

Don't ad networks charge for ad size as well? (or they should start charging for this - would cut on abuse)

If your ad is > 50k then you're paying a fee per display, even if you're "pay per click"

I disagree. I see small auto playing videos all the time in reviews or on feature pages, explaining little concepts or details that are much easier to grasp in a few seconds of (silent) video than in a paragraph or two.

The alternative is going back to large, low quality and bandwidth-heavy gifs, which isn't the better option in my opinion.

That's a legitimate use of video, but not of autoplaying video.

I'm not sure, I actually enjoy the autoplaying videos on FB. I probably wouldn't click 99% of videos I see but silently autoplaying it I get to see a few seconds without having to interact and then decide if I want to keep scrolling or click on it to get sound.

> hat really should be done is getting rid of auto playing videos at the HTML spec level. While there are legitimate uses for autoplaying videos (YouTube for example), it has too much potential for abuse by ad networks.

Most of Facebook's video traffic is in their mobile app, getting rid of it in the HTML spec level wouldn't make a difference for FB.

Wait... get rid of auto playing videos at the spec level? I'd rather have the autoplay flag made explicit, rather than some hacked up soup of code that makes sure the video autoplays.

When intent is captured (e.g. specific "autoplay" flag) my browser client can interpret the flags according to my choosing. Capturing intent > not capturing intent.

You mean an attribute on the video tag? That is a thing. It looks like this:

    <video autoplay>...</video>

> What really should be done is getting rid of auto playing videos at the HTML spec level.

Or, let autoplay be a an explicit flag in the spec that is advisory as to publisher's intent, and establish a norm of user agents providing at least "big switch" configurability (Autoplay video on/off) and, ideally, optional per-site override of default on/off configuration for autoplay.

It's not a problem but a feature that increases Facebook's revenue by not insignificant multiples.

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