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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience.

Predictable in a user application is the same result from the same action every time. UX changing based on opaque logic and heuristics is anything but predictable.

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yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do

My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing

I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.

> I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.

...because then it's not autoplay anymore?

"Allow this website to automatically play videos in the future" sounds exactly like autoplay to me. Just not the first time.

I have developed an instinctual reaction to automatically deny permissions like remotely that for any website, and I think most people have. Websites asking for permission to send notifications provokes the same irritation. I think - "I am in the middle of doing something, I don't want to stop and think carefully about permissions for some vague and abstract future encounters, I want the annoying dialog to go away and the site to get out of my way."

Notably though: If some dialog like this came up even on a specific site like Youtube where I would almost invariably benefit from granting those permissions, I think there is a huge percentage chance I would knee-jerk deny the permission even when if I stopped to think about it, denying that permission would probably make my user experience worse. Lastly, there is an almost infinitesimal chance of me ever seeking out the settings to re-evaluate my choice on this.

The only websites where I have allowed notifications are discord and slack. I can't see any reason why a news site should be allowed notifications. I know why the site wants to send me notifications - alert on new articles loaded, draw me back in, keep my traffic, just like why they want me to install a native app - but I can't see the benefit to me.

Still, if I've managed to allow notifications to slack/discord I'm sure I could figure out allowing autoplay on YouTube/twitch.

That’s because websites developers haven’t learnt the 5-years-old iOS UX pattern of not asking for privacy permissions the moment the user opens the app but later in a more contextual way. Eg: request for contacts permission when the user is explicitly looking for a friend to share something.

In incognito mode every time is the first time. No thank you very much, there are way too many "don't show this again" messages to go through already.

> My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube.

Which is fine to me. If I go to a website specifically for videos, I want it to autoplay, having to press play is a pointless action.

If I go to a website to read articles, I do not want autoplay, and I definitely don't want the video to even follow me around as a tiny minimized window when I scroll down and yes I will close the tab or press back pretty quick if that happens (as I come to the realization the effort to read this article is not worth the gain and realize that I probably was procrastinating anyway to end up on that article in the first place so should do something more productive). If it's interesting enough I will play the video myself, preferably with full control of its time slider myself and preferably without it auto-starting an unrelated different video after this one was done.

I may go there to view a video, but that does not mean i want it to start playing the moment the page starts loading.

Then the preference differs per person. Optimal for me would be if anyone can create a personal whitelist of websites that may autoplay :)

EDIT: or "learn" I guess, let's see how long it takes to learn my simple whitelist and how often it will randomly decide to change :p

that's why it's learning from your actions

Not the same thing, if going by the article. If I eventually play all the videos, at my own leasure, it will still learn that I play the videos and start playing immediately when the page loads.

That's the rub. How do you differentiate between the articles thing and the video thing?

You get a convenient way to enable auto play on that website only.

That would mean everyone will have to "whitelist" Youtube and allow playback after updating Chrome. No way this "option" gets the stamp of approval from Google management.

That's exactly what they did, but they pre-populated the whitelist with 1000 entries of video streaming sites. If you want to add your own, simply press play in the respective site.

> and I definitely don't want the video to even follow me around as a tiny minimized window

Why the hell did this become a standard pattern on news sites anyway? It's the WORST.

Killing autoplay wouldn't break Youtube for me. I love Youtube and mostly hate autoplay. What's so bad about clicking a play button?

>I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.

Allow location access? Y/N

Allow autoplay? Y/N

Safe this password? Y/N

Translate website? Y/N

This website uses cookies. OK

Do you want our newsletter? NO

Yeah, I don't know either. Adding to that list sounds like a great idea.

Things are so bad now that I keep my earphones plugged in but not in my ear. It's easier than trying to quickly hit mute when I'm surprised by a site and disruptive blaring starts.

The problem is, when you do want to listen to something, if you're a 200+ open tabs across 10 windows in FF/Chrome user like me, tracking down the individual tabs that are playing audio is damn near impossible.

And please someone don't say I'm doing it wrong....why can't browser programmers expose a list of tabs playing audio, and allow navigation to each from that list? (And the same goes for tabs consuming excessive CPU - in FF, I can see the offending websites in about:performance, and I can close the tab from there, but what if I wanted to navigate to the tab instead?)

eh, as a user, it's not really predictable to me whether any given click will result in something autoplaying or not, it already feels like a crap shoot.

I think it depends a lot on how stable the learning is. If it converges and becomes harder to unlearn, eventually you'll be working from a stable platform... but it doesn't carry over to another browser unless you use the sign in feature. So you'll get a stable experience within a browser but not between browsers of the same make/model.

> unless you use the sign in feature

Which then becomes yet another reason to use the sign in feature, and yet another reason to stay with the same browser brand.

Dark pattern. Why are we signing into browsers again? Happily using FF without that bullshit.

hi, it looks like you are writing a web browser. I can help with it.

(hope kids still remember clippy)

100%. And it’s like they have forgotten anybody ever shares computers in a family. Google has lost the plot lately.

Get used to it, based on recent communication from Google one of their big new goals is using ML to improve... everything.

Of course they threw the word "learn" in there to make it sound like advanced new tech, but this seems like something that can be done with simple heuristics (as opposed to machine learning).

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