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Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

I don't see them turning off auto-playing videos on YouTube (after finishing watching one) -- seems a little hypocritical.

Netflix is now in this game too, auto-playing trailers as you scroll titles with no way to turn the feature off.

Clearly force-feeding users videos boosts traffic (or they wouldn't do it) but it annoys, what? At least 50% of users?

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They have a reasonably coherent generalization planned for this[0].

Chrome will track a user's actual video consumption habits per origin, and compare it to the user's total visits to that origin. Video consumption is judged to be intentional if play is longer than 7 seconds, audio is unmuted, the tab is active, and the video is bigger than 200x140 px.

Then, if the ratio of actual video consumption to visits is high enough, Chrome desktop will allow autoplay. (My read is that Chrome mobile will wholly disable autoplay.)

If you always pause / mute playback on news sites but let Youtube autoplay, Chrome will learn to allow Youtube to autoplay.

If you always pause/mute playback on Youtube, Chrome will learn not to autoplay Youtube.

You can see what inferences Chrome has made at chrome://media-engagement .

(I'm not a Google employee nor a Chrome developer and may be accidentally misrepresenting this policy, but I've attempted to describe it accurately.)

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

Are those AND conditions or OR conditions on autoplays? If and, will we see these videos shrink to 199x139 to avoid tripping the detectors? Oh happy day, the pause button will be even smaller and harder to click!

AND. Hence my use of the word, "and." :-)

I think you misunderstand the metric. Videos smaller than 199x139 will not qualify as "user intended to watch this video" and therefore Chrome will disable autoplay on those sites.

How about just off by default? Seems pretty basic.

There are Chrome plugins that purport to do this but I still get auto-playing videos.

I don't want to train Chrome. I don't even bother turning off auto-playing videos b/c it's a hassle, I just stay on mute.

Don't ad buyers complain about all these fake views from auto-playing videos? I guess not, or if they do Google doesn't care.

>How about just off by default? Seems pretty basic.

No, I like having videos I actually want to watch autoplay.

Fine. But at least give me the option of turning them off. As stated above, even their hard-to-find flag settings don't seem to work.

Off-by-default is an option now for advanced users (such as might be reading HN). On the same page I linked in my earlier comment you are responding to, see:

> You can try out these new policies by setting the experimental flag chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to "Document user activation is required." in Chrome 64.

Like you, that is my preference as well, and I have set the flag.

Doesn't work. Have you tried it?

1. Go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

2. The options in the drop down are:

A. Default

B. No User Gesture is Required

C. User gesture is required for cross-origin frames

D. Document user activation is required

Select D. Relaunch. Go to ABC News. Autoplays videos.

I'm kind of shocked Netflix is going down this route, for some reason I never expected them to stoop this low.

I'm sure the metrics say it boosts engagement or they wouldn't do it, but to me it renders their UX unusable -- I can't read a description because the video is blaring at me.

Re: Netflix -- will this feature have control over media embedded via EME?

I suspect the UX will be that once audio is enabled for any video in the page any subsequent videos will get a free pass, and not some special treatment for Google.

Yeah, I doubt they're white-listing their domains, my point is just they are (arguably) the worst offenders of auto-playing videos, so I take this announcement with a grain of salt.

the option to turn off autoplay is clearly visible on top of your recommended queue

That option is to automatically switch to a new video after completing the current video. The link is about videos that start playing when you open a link- in YouTube's case, the first video in the queue.

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