Hacker News Reader

Comment by B-Con | Hacker News Reader

Autoplay is a cancer that spread across the popular media platforms. Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix seem to have all abandoned the idea that the app shouldn't play distracting video and sound without prompting. (I haven't checked Hulu in years, I don't know what they're up to.)

Remember when it was annoying pop-ups that auto-played video and sound? Now it's a feature to extract as many watch-time minutes from users as possible. I guarantee it's all A/B testing looking for a few points of uptick in watch time.

View on HN

Just yesterday, I found that YouTube on my TV reenabled auto-play on it's own even though I disabled it long ago. Even though I doubt it was intentional, I found this incredibly frustrating.

How could it be unintentional? At best it was a deliberate ignorance of the consequences of a settings schema upgrade. Just like how bank errors always are in favor of the bank.

Realistically... Very easily? The default is to have auto-play on, I can imagine many scenarios where settings get lost. I've not heard general outcry about this so my best guess is that it's an edge case.

I know a few other cases regarding auto-play and youtube too.

I've had it re-enable itself a few times. I'm sure it's due to the extra add-ons and such I use that's messing with it. A few of my friends don't use the same add-ons I use, or they don't use any and have had it happen enough times for them to complain to me about it.

My friend first found out his auto-play was re-enabled after youtube ate up most of his monthly bandwidth cap in one night.

So we're definitely in the minority, but it does seem to happen to different people with very different configurations.

Twitch auto played when it was embedded on a website and used 6GB before I realized causing my internet to be shaped. Fortunately it was only a couple of days before the quota refreshed. I now block the ttvnw.net domain using a browser addon.

Disabling autoplay completely is a better bet. They aren't the only ones that will do that to you and you'll be fighting it the rest of your life.

There is none of this nonsense on Hulu (from my phone to Chromecast). I recently dropped Netflix for Hulu simply because of the more interesting portfolio.

Same here. I literally found myself scrolling Netflix for many, many minutes on end. It essentially became Facebook. I don’t know if the issue is their catalog has expanded with so many originals that it’s hard to find something to watch and or that not having ratings (to tell if something sucks) me to not watch.

Sure they have some stellar content but they also have a lot of crap.

IMHO most of Netflix's catalogue is crap... Or their recommender system just doesn't get me. It seems to have overfit on anime, even though I just watched a couple a long time ago.

The fact that Netflix no longer has a rating system is quite sad. That was one of the high points of Netflix back in the day - the ability to read reviews of shows/movies before committing to them. Now everything has to be “recommended” to me.

The Hulu Originals, as sparse as they are, are outstanding across the board. It's like the early days of Netflix Originals.

Plus if I want to watch current TV or more recent shows alongside originals it’s available on Hulu. Netflix has lost a lot of the more bingeable shows and it really doesn’t have any current content.

I get that Netflix is a different beast than Hulu in many ways. But for cord cutters Hulu feels more like the total package.

But then you have to watch commercials in the middle of the content - that's worse to me, paying money for the service and still getting commercials.

Hulu without commercials doesn’t have commercials in the middle of content.

I pay for Hulu (it costs about as much as Netflix I think) and there are no commercials, unless you're watching content from one of their partners.

Hulu doesn't auto-play.

Their horror is an awful text heavy interface with 5 inch size font on my TV.

My pet peeve with their horrific UI is that rather than underlining what you have selected they _overline_ it.

> Remember when it was annoying pop-ups that auto-played video and sound?

I remember even further back when the internet put users in control.

Hulu does have autoplay, at least on the Android TV app, which is why we use it much more than we do Netflix. If there weren’t a few Netflix original shows which my wife and I really enjoy, we’d cancel our subscription.

You mean doesn't?

Oops... yes, I meant “Hulu does not have autoplay”

Too late to edit unfortunately

Kind of playing devil’s advocate here since there’s so many negative comments on this feature, but is it possible that this was a well-intentioned design decision on the part of Netflix?

I personally like having the ability to preview content rapidly—I can glean a lot about a show/movie in just a few seconds of video (title/thumbnail alone is low-info). The old pattern was ~5 clicks + buffer time to watch a preview (if one was even available). Also, opening Netflix signals an intention to receive audio+video—this isn’t nearly so bad as e.g. ESPN’s site randomly blasting you with a video as I’m trying to read an article.

Anyways, I agree that software should be as user-configurable as is reasonable, and it seems that these days apps like Netflix are completely bereft of meaningful options. Also much of the content that Netflix pumps out feels like the output of a generative algorithm designed to cover market segments vs. anything guided by a sort of original artistic vision.

(PS—can we collectively pump the brakes on the “X minor annoyance is cancer” lingo?)

For me there is definitely a bit of a "hype gap" for most shows on Netflix and those previews make it a bit smaller. A title and some random faces just don't get me interested in anything. I remember actually wishing for trailers on more than one occasion.

But it's easy for me to not get upset about auto-playing trailers because my primary client never got updated to support them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com