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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound.

Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!

Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?

And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?

P.S. I already had autoplay for videos without sound disabled through about:config flags, but some videos managed to autoplay anyway. I wonder if they also fixed that issue, or simply made the about:config flag part of the settings dialog.

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> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?

There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the metrics (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-alle...) but it’ll take years to de-pivot everyone’s shiny new toys and the staffing invested in producing low information density content.

decades probably, I still have people insisting on getting their meta keywords right is of top tier importance. i blame libraries keeping old online marketing how to books from the 90's on the shelves.

We may never be free of it; it's gone on long enough that there's a whole generation that's grown up thinking it's normal to get information by watching a five minute video that conveys the same information as five lines of text.

People that choose 5-minute videos over 5 lines of text probably aren't doing it because they can't do the latter. They do the former to fill time. Popcorn for the brain, if you're bored.

I often wonder, why are people so bored? I'm fighting off doing my typical "old man rant" but I often hear people dream of a life where they have no responsibilities, but then I notice that most people fill their time with fluff -- because they are bored. I do it myself, even!

Fun fact: I'm on HN posting this post, not because this is what I want to do, but because it was the easiest thing I could think of starting to do after I finished up some work. If only it were easier to aim at stuff that I actually want to do... Hmmm...

Cal Newport's latest book Digital Minimalism has some tips, but none of them are quick-fixes.

"Get a challenging hobby" is basically the idea. Which is a great idea! I just have to, y'know, do it...

Commutes and jobs are soaking up more time, most people live in places with increased travel times to anything, and there’s never been more opportunity for easy distraction - why spend 40 minutes round trip driving somewhere to do something when you can watch Netflix on the couch?

Most importantly, though, are smartphones: you didn’t used to have so much just a second away anywhere you went. There’s an entire industry building entertainment for people in lines, on transit, walking to their car, etc. so I don’t think it’s as much that distraction is replacing previous big activities but filling in lots of space throughout the day.

It won't de-pivot, advertising techniques are a ratchet and they all become yet more products or options that agencies & sites provide. We'd still be getting popunder Netflix ads from Zedo if browser makers hadn't shut that functionality down.

If advertisers aren’t seeing returns, they’ll eventually shift spending since video ads are expensive to produce and place. I wouldn’t bet against them finding something even more annoying, however.

Of course they're going to come up with new and exciting forms of interruption, but "shift spending" is extremely malleable, and agencies will still provide the feature for a price. Also, it's my understanding that there are no "returns" per se on brand advertising (vs. product advertising), regardless of medium.

No “returns” in directly measurable sales but all but the most unconcerned companies are going to look at interactions and ask whether they’re getting enough versus the cost, especially since the Facebook measurement scandal got a lot of attention.

The word "enough" is doing a lot of work there.

Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.

Or even worse (and anecdotally more common), a video that is hardly relevant or from a year-old story.

> 5KB news article

On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.

NPR + rejecting cookies under their GDPR scheme makes the page a dream.

Also note https://text.npr.org/

There is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight.

https://text.npr.org/

They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...

HN comments? It's as much "news" as the vast majority of major sites...

comments are a poor replacement for journalism.

But surprisingly better than what often passes for journalism.

There's CNN Lite as well. https://lite.cnn.com/en

I wish they would use more of that on mobile or even the old m.cnn.com. The more recent trend of "www-m.cnn.com" URLs is glacially slow, even when going through a Raspberry Pi.

I created https://legiblenews.com/ because of this frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is exactly 1 request.

The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn something.

Cool site Brad.I havent heard of it.

I like the way you make the categories. Finally, someone calling a spade is a spade.

Eg. "Disasters and accidents" had disasters and accidents.

It did highlight how much of our news isn't the most uplifting of topics however.

I like it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better sources for popular stories like these.

The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's author isn't directly choosing those sources.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Nice!

This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself.

Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style (ISO-8601 / xkcd-1179).

But nice!

I haven't looked at the actual data, but if I go to cnn.com, which I visit routinely enough, I imagine most of the assets are already cached. The ads and embedded video, though, are a bandwidth sink.

Wikipedia Current Events portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is 40K for me with cached data.

I think the point was the news article itself is only 5KB. The rest is website fluff.

With rates like that I'm surprised you don't use NoScript with a whitelist.

With ublock origin you can block loading of media above a certain size.

You can pair that with addon called, "Image video block" https://github.com/tiborbarsi/image-video-block-browser-addo...

And finally, you can use Bandwidth hero to compress images on the fly. You need to host the server instance on Heroku. Their free tier should suffice

Niceee...As someone recently put in the same.position as OP is great to know there are options around. I almost dropped Mozilla for this autoplaying mute videos crap.

Why are you spending so much? There are many ways to get bandwidth for less. AT&T Home Wireless (doesn't have to be used at home) is $1/GB. There are many resellers of unlimited hotspots. Sometimes deals come up, like Verizon's now discontinued prepaid unlimited hotspot for $65/m.

unless you turn off images, sound and video and probably javascript, I'm afraid you're gonna have a bad time with that "5kb" news article.

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much

Advertising metrics.

> And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?

I believe autoplay is off by default on mobile, so it's a significant market.

Good. I live rural and have heavily metered LTE as my Internet, or else it's really slow satellite or P2P wireless. Auto-play video is the bane of my existence; every website seems to assume these days that if you're on desktop, you have giant bandwidth.

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?

Probably so they can show advertisers that every month, they stream XXX terabytes of video, thereby getting these advertisers to pay them more money.

Not technically a lie as long as you don't pretend people are actually watching these videos.

The fascinating part is how advertisers fall for that every time. How can this still be a problem?

if everyone does it, maybe it becomes a useful metric of how many user-hours you get?

Yes, thank god.

I've never understood why news sites push silent video down your throat. They are wasting serious amounts bandwidth.

"Why do websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time you want?"

Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry.

1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau...

2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/

3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne...

4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/

5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts...

6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

Video codecs compress better than GIFs, so auto playing video elements can be used for this.

But why does a news article need video?

when you're tired after work, watching a video is easier than reading. the longer you're watching videos on top-quality-journalism.example.com the longer they can serve you ads

CPCV, Cost Per Completed View. Advertisers pay more for completed ad views.

There's about a thousand cynical answers to your question, but the truth is simply that not everyone is like your (or me): all measures (return visits, pages/visit, conversions, etc) just happen to be better for autoplaying video.

I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it.

Turns out we like it where we expect it. Just not from random google results to sites we rarely visit.

We like it on pages where the only reason to go to the page is to view the video. In these cases, autoplay saves time. And they're clearly distinct from cases where someone might go to a page for reasons other than viewing that video. (Examples: a news site with a text story, Youtube's channel pages)

> I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!

Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA.

Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.

Glad. I do affiliate marketing, and as part of my research into this area I have to look at hundreds of landing pages with talking heads explaining how to buy cheap cialis. One notable ploy they use is autoplaying audio & video to grab your attention. Little do they realize that users instantly find the offending video and close the tab. Autoplay actually increases the churn rate.

Yesterday I was reading an article and, part way through, a video started playing on the sidebar. I saw it, thought it looked interesting, but wanted to finish the article before watching. I paused the video. As I scrolled further the video resumed (reproducibly). By the time I'd finished the article it was auto-playing a new video, and there was no way to find the original.

I was excited for a second, but ESPN's site still autoplays videos, e.g.:

https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110...

Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?

Because forced exposure to advertising pays better than letting you decide when to consume it (if you ever do).

Not to mention the waste of bandwidth - imagine being on a metered connection and forgetting a Bloomberg tab in the background. It will happily stream a neverending series of videos for hours if I remember correctly.

That's going to break textural videos too, isn't it? :(

Kind of silly that animated gifs will continue to work fine, but as soon as you try to use a format that doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of bandwidth...

Just bookmark https://www.bbc.com/news and you'll be happy.

there is a preference now that lets you block both audio and video inside about:preferences | security & privacy | autoplay permissions. so you probably don't need to do the about:config thing.

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