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Comment by madiathomas | Hacker News Reader

I don't like sites with autoplay. I only expect autoplay when the page I am about to visit is in a video site like YouTube. I hate it when I am reading a news article and a video autoplays.

Autoscrolling also can be irritating. If I click a TechCrunch article on HN, I don't want TC to load more articles at the end of the article I was reading without my consent. It is better to suggest related articles and give me an option to click on them if I am interested.

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> I hate it when I am reading a news article and a video autoplays.

Not only that, but the video follows you around while you scroll and most of the time you can't get it off your screen.

Not sure what is the benefit of that video that follows you. If I wanted to watch the video, I was going stop scrolling and watch it. In most cases, those videos don't even allow you to pause them. They disable the pause button.

I don't want YT to autoplay either, and you used to be able to make it not autoplay in the settings, but that was too useful I guess.

A blanket banning of autoplay will be the only solution then. While at it, they must ban autoplaying of suggested videos. Autoplaying of suggested videos is the video site equivalent of autoscrolling.

Yeah, I toggle that switch off every few weeks when it 'mysteriously' toggles itself back on.

I really hate google's YT, they even throw up (the equivalent of) 'buffering' more than it ever did when they didn't have a huge worldwide CDN behind it.

> I only expect autoplay when the page I am about to visit is in a video site like YouTube.

Here's the problem with it. There are exceptions, but it's extremely difficult to write the law in a way that can't be gamed if you allow exceptions.

Banning autoplay altogether will be the only solution to the problem. Then an opt-in setting can be baked into browsers to allow certain sites to use audio/video features. That way all sites will be treated the same. News sites can always claim to be video playing sites like YouTube, just to be included in the exceptin list.

Let's ban interfering with ad blockers then. Let's enshrine the spirit of the HTTP protocol by legally reinforcing the core idea - the server only provides content and suggests how to show it; the User Agent renders it however it likes.

Do this, and autoplay issue will sort itself out.

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