Disabling autoplaying videos in Chrome goes viral

[wraith808]

Chris Meadows posted a Twitter tip telling how to disable autoplay video in Chrome: "If you use Google Chrome, go to

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

  --and set it to 'Document user activation is required.' Boom: no more auto-playing videos. You’re welcome." 6,000 retweets later, Meadows talks about how the viral response shows wide frustration with the web experience. (TeleRead):

https://teleread.org/2017/10/05/disabling-autoplaying-videos-in-chrome-goes-viral/


The question still remains, however...

It puzzles me that so many sites seem to think that annoying people is the best way to endear themselves to their audience, but even I hadn’t realized just how annoying people find it.

Why do sites insist on annoying their visitors?

[mouser]

I wonder if its because we have moved from a regular/repeat-customer environment, where sites cared about cultivating a loyal user base, to a search-engine/stream-of-new-users environment, where there is no such thing as a regular/loyal reader, and so you don't have to care about how much you annoy any given visitor.

[Contro]

Some months ago I assisted to a grow hacking conference. I dare to say that I don't like those measures and was attacked because anyone have the right to obtain benefits. They offer you a "free" service and you don't have any rights except you're a premium !.

It's a constant change of culture too. I don't imagine mouser, by example, using aggresive marketing measures, but is in the future is necessary probably will do too.

It's the price to be paid when we are not really free.

In the next article by Albert Einstein "Why Socialism" probably find some answer to this general questioning.

Some day in a near future we may lose our "free" email accounts in the same way recently we lose our images hosted in photobucket.

Some days ago I was inspecting (or revising) first posts in this forum.  I am visiting forums years ago and some have dissappeared. Great forums like softonic have been considerably reduced by the presence of the social media. Forums like DC that begins being small today are great !.

We don't know what will bring the future, but every attempt to change the basic human nature always have failed. I hope some aggresive techniques will fail too.

As a spanish poet said about the system : Don't forget ! : Our commands are your desires.

We'll have to fight for this.

[Stoic Joker]

Why do sites insist on annoying their visitors?

Because marketing people are scum? I don't think it's necessarily the fault of the site op, as they're usually just trying to get a few shekels per hundred banner clicks or something. They drop a advertiser provided (frequently poorly written) script on their site, and it then proceeds to pull gobs of random shit out of the river swill and sprays it all over the site with zero control over what sort of utter crap it might actually be.

*Shrug*

...I'm just glad there's a way to disable autoplay in FF also.

it’s possible to do the same thing in Firefox by typing “about:config” in the address bar and searching for “media.autoplay.enabled” and switching it to “false,”

...But no hope for IE/Edge yet.

[TaoPhoenix]

"Why do sites insist on annoying visitors" I think is a more economically dangerous question than just marketers are scum".

I think mouser's note above is a good starting point, and maybe relates to a quick article I just passed by a few days ago that "if a property doesn't pull in top dollars compared to b,c,d,y, and Q, pull it".

The Collective We has lamented the clash of quality vs "clickbait" and "cultured vs TV" so on with different lingoes for about 70 years now.

[Contro]

The power is a group technique.

So I'm afraid that when the order is going to come, little but active pieces of the system will only have one option : obey.

Specially when the command comes from corporations that don't represent the people.

Ejem. I am reading Why Socialism by Albert Einstein about the predatory phase and all that. Are we in that phase ?

[Deozaan]

The question still remains, however...

It puzzles me that so many sites seem to think that annoying people is the best way to endear themselves to their audience, but even I hadn’t realized just how annoying people find it.

Why do sites insist on annoying their visitors?

I think the answer to this is similar to why so-called "free to play" games have become so popular (and annoying!) over the past few years. The games themselves are "free" for anyone to play but generally are severely limited or hampered in some way (often by making players wait N hours before they can perform an action vital to gameplay/progression). These games also offer in-app purchases (IAPs) which buy consumable items that players can use to (temporarily) remove or bypass these limitations which objectively improves their experience with the game (meaning the game is designed to suck for everyone who isn't paying anything). The fact that these items are consumable (meaning they can only be used once per purchase) and their effects are only temporary, this encourages players to repeatedly buy more and more. These types of games don't care much about the freeloaders, which make up the vast majority of their players. They only need to capture a few so-called "whales" who end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on these consumable IAPs.

I suppose that many sites have a similar philosophy: Quantity over quality. Get your message out to as many people as possible in an effort to capture the few who "fall for it" and give them money. And who cares what happens to all the rest.

[J-Mac]

I thought wraith808 - and then Mouser in the second post - was referring to auto-play videos that are the site's content, not necessarily advertisements. And just in case they weren’t, I'll jump on that complaint! Websites that set their own videos to auto-play. Also, videos that automatically jump to infinite other videos after the first end. And finally... embedded video players that are set for maximum volume and have no user volume control available!

Grrrr..  getting me worked up here!

Jim