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Comment by dguaraglia | Hacker News Reader

The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

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I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.

It could be a permission (like sharing location) or maybe a permission that can only be requested after the user clicks play on a few videos. (That would prevent me having to select "no" to every trash website that requests permissions, like Chrome allowed with pushed content permissions in the past.

> everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos

That's basically what they're doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...

Is there anyway to wipe the whitelist?

If only you could somehow enable users to make decisions for themselves we could solve this....

Not really a solution. It works for repeat visits to sites users visit often, it doesn't really work at scale. Users want sane defaults; most of them will never change them. A world where sites are by default as malicious as users allow them to be is not a world where the internet is a friendly and powerful resource for everyone.

Making this a setting doesn't preclude sane defaults, like disabling autoplay everywhere except youtube.

It's even more complicated because I only want YouTube to autoplay when I open it in a foreground tab.

That is how YouTube behaves today. It doesn't play until you foreground the tab. I don't see why that would change.

It might if you implement a new system for how autoplay is decided. Not every browser avoids autoplaying YouTube in background tabs.

And this is why we can't have nice things. FWIW I agree with the decision to stop autoplaying, but it's worth pointing out that it does have negative consequences:

- Stops YouTube (et al) videos autoplaying (whitelist to fix?) - Probably stops games playing music when first opened (e.g., https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/, although note I have settings to disable music and SFX)

God forbid we get to a point where automatic execution of JavaScript is disabled by default but I can see it going that way.

Like I say, I agree with the decision, but sadly all these fixes for reigning in the excesses of the worst scumbag websites make the web overall just a little bit worse for everybody. :/

We've had plugins to stop automatic execution of JS for a while. I used one for about 6 months, then one day I got a new computer and didn't bother to install it... it's only when I find pages like the one I described above that I think (for like two seconds) "oh, NoScript would've stopped that." So it's only a few bad players ruining it for most of us, as you say.

They do it because video preroll CPM is waayyy higher than display advertising. Like up to $15/cpm.. Multiples of that if you can get the right deals in place (not remnant).

Ohhhh, I see. I always wondered what the point was. Thanks for the clarification!

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