Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed.
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.
Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.
Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).
I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.
I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.
A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.
Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?
Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.
I feel like these are “somebody got a promotion” patterns.
Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?
In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.
When I worked at a rather large publisher they did a deal like this because someone promised a large truck of revenue by a company.
For a site that was badly monetized (because they it was over-weighed with ads and poorly engineered to begin with) this was seen as something they could not say no to.
Again, it is a slow race to the bottom.
I can assure you that often these deals are done by the business-side without consultation with product/engineering.
This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).
I'm to the point I'd like to see them go 501c3 nonprofit.
Admit defeat.
Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.
Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.
Newspapers you lost the war.
The sooner you realize it the better.
Follow the PBS model at this point.
(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)
Most likely the leadership team is aware that these "viewers" just exist in theorey but they can fool advertisers into thinking their channel has a higher reach and collect more advertising revenue in return.
You know, if you paused it, you closed it, maybe even mis-clicked you interacted with it, that's engagement for way too many metrics. You are not gonna consider them to not be or even be negative, who wants their numbers go down? Destroys the nice hockey stick chart, promotion, etc.
It's maybe not the best, but it's also not evil. And by that standard "somebody had a good day". I won't blame them. That's what teams, managers, corporate cultures, capitalism, the system or whatever incentive for, and that's what they get.
The goal of these sites is normally to be as profitable as possible. If they achieve that goal at the cost of pissing off "a bunch of geeks", I don't think they'll care.
If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.
Often, they can also show the much more important "well-paid video ad played" event. Video ads pay much better than other ads, and I believe that those videos are often ad-ridden - we just don't notice because your ad blocker takes care of that. (I know I've seen it a couple of times, but I don't know how frequent it is because I rarely make the mistake of visiting a news site on a browser without an ad blocker.)
Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
And the one publish ads gets absolutely no attention even though the numbers looks good. Who on the earth will watch a video stick at the corner of a news site page?
It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
> It's not just autoplaying video that's the problem, it's the fact that these videos then go on to autoplay something else completely unconnected to what you were reading without asking you first.
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
This is a common theme with non-profits and open source projects. They see the for-profit incumbents doing something toxic and cargo cult it like not providing a similar experience would betray the users when it's really the opposite.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
The worst offender for this, in my opinion, is Wikia (sorry, "Fandom™"). There is zero attempt to make the autoplaying content at all relevant to the wiki in question, and it generally isn't even advertising anything, it's just... crap.
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
Have you ever driven across a bridge, or along a highway and run over one of those "hit counter" cables that the Department of Transportation lays out to know how many people are driving on that bridge, or that highway?
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
That's E-ZPass, FasTrak, etc. Also those toll bridges where they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill that includes a $6 "convenience fee"
They hide ALPR everywhere. All it takes is a camera. I've seen it on the backside of normal green highway signs, where you can't see it and would never suspect it. The idea is to create a dragnet.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
This is a pretty bad analogy, because there's very little that online advertisers track that license plate readers can't. In both cases, it rarely stretches beyond a dataset of "Which people have visited which (pages|businesses)" and whatever statistical inferences you can claim to make from that data. Businesses already use license plate readers for marketing and analytics purposes. (Although, of course, not as widely deployed or as well-known as advertising cookie tracking)
I worry that ad-blockers and similar contribute to this.
I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.
It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.
How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.
It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"
App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.
(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)
How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.
You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al.
Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites.
The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites known to use dark UX, and warn you not to click thru.
I myself run a userscript on Google that removes results from websites that I'd prefer to avoid.
Websites still find their way around this setting. I think they put an overlay on the page and intercept the first mouse event they can, and use that to start playing the video.
I usually just blacklist these websites in my Pihole.
I swear Safari used to block autoplay-with-audio, and it recently stopped blocking it. I remember this because I specifically needed to set audio to disabled to get a video clip to autoplay on my blog (basically just a more efficient GIF).
> How about an extension that disables video elements until you click on them ... Like how Internet Explorer treated Java applets towards the end on their days.
No.
Short MP4 files should replace GIFs. MP4 files are more efficient than the terrible compression GIF files have. I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message... discussion of tactics and "movement" of dynamic video game stuff is pretty common. (Any game requires the player to gain instincts that "predict the future", and short GIFs and/or MP4 files really help show off key moments).
> I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message
No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.
The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?
I never want auto playing videos. Ever. It is my personal preference and i should be able to express that in my browser, overriding your preference, as the author of the web page.
The client has two important values: attention/time and battery. Your preference screws both.
There's a couple of solutions to that (such as only looping once or for X seconds or not showing it).
Either way, you think too much from content creator PoV, IMO.
The web was made in such a way that clients are able to (massively) modify the content or the way it is shown. If you don't fancy that then you don't fancy one of the core foundations of the web. I use all kind of extensions to modify my web experience. If your PoV would become dominant, I simply would not use WWW anymore.
Default experience matters because most people don't use extensions, or not the same ones (power users do) so you get your way anyway. And I don't get my way on Firefox Mobile because they decided to axe a lot of extensions, and I don't get my way on work Citrix because admins decided which extensions are worthwhile (they block all video stuff, btw).
Readit News
The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.
Deleted Comment
It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
Deleted Comment
As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.
Deleted Comment
Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?
In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.
When I worked at a rather large publisher they did a deal like this because someone promised a large truck of revenue by a company.
For a site that was badly monetized (because they it was over-weighed with ads and poorly engineered to begin with) this was seen as something they could not say no to.
Again, it is a slow race to the bottom.
I can assure you that often these deals are done by the business-side without consultation with product/engineering.
Admit defeat.
Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.
Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.
Newspapers you lost the war.
The sooner you realize it the better.
Follow the PBS model at this point.
(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)
Dead Comment
It's maybe not the best, but it's also not evil. And by that standard "somebody had a good day". I won't blame them. That's what teams, managers, corporate cultures, capitalism, the system or whatever incentive for, and that's what they get.
A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.
Its usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.
You might argue this is to do with advertisers and so on, but this also happens on the BBC News website too. I recently clicked on a video story and after the video was finished I didn't notice there was a 5 second timer and suddenly I got a totally different video play by itself.
WHY?!
No, screw that as well. If there's a text article with a video attached, I don't want to be interrupted by the autoplaying video while I'm reading the text.
But these companies have completely different goals than the BBC: they aim to abuse and exploit their users as much as possible.
Because that's how the web team is measured and rewarded. Management wants to see more view views, longer time on site, etc. Leadership doesn't understand nor care about a shite UX (so no one lower in the org is concerned).
It seems like they're desperately trying to believe they have a social network on their hands rather than a collection of disparate knowledge bases, and they're trying to sell this non-existent 'fandom' culture to visitors.
Now imagine that the cable can reach up into your car at the exact moment that you cross over it and pull down your person and your entire life's history.
You're being tracked by your car and phone bluetooth MAC addresses. That's how the "X minutes to exit Y" signboards work. They time how long it takes to see a particular MAC address appear at the next receiver.
I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.
It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.
How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.
It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"
App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.
(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)
You could add a whitelist feature to the extension for YouTube et al.
Sure, it would be nice if websites didn't do shitty UX, but as others have said, don't visit those sites.
The other extension idea I had was one which would reference a database of sites known to use dark UX, and warn you not to click thru.
I myself run a userscript on Google that removes results from websites that I'd prefer to avoid.
I usually just blacklist these websites in my Pihole.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
Or even better, endless server stream for an animated gif.
No.
Short MP4 files should replace GIFs. MP4 files are more efficient than the terrible compression GIF files have. I've made a few video game pages where auto-playing MP4s were essential at giving the right message... discussion of tactics and "movement" of dynamic video game stuff is pretty common. (Any game requires the player to gain instincts that "predict the future", and short GIFs and/or MP4 files really help show off key moments).
Factorio thing I wrote a while back:
https://factorioguide.nfshost.com/backpressure.html
No. What you say is simply factually inaccurate. I've looked at the web page in your URL and it would be much better without distracting auto-playing video.
The video should play then the user wants it to play. Is that really so hard to understand?
I never want auto playing videos. Ever. It is my personal preference and i should be able to express that in my browser, overriding your preference, as the author of the web page.
Just like gif was in 90s.
The client has two important values: attention/time and battery. Your preference screws both.
There's a couple of solutions to that (such as only looping once or for X seconds or not showing it).
Either way, you think too much from content creator PoV, IMO.
The web was made in such a way that clients are able to (massively) modify the content or the way it is shown. If you don't fancy that then you don't fancy one of the core foundations of the web. I use all kind of extensions to modify my web experience. If your PoV would become dominant, I simply would not use WWW anymore.
Default experience matters because most people don't use extensions, or not the same ones (power users do) so you get your way anyway. And I don't get my way on Firefox Mobile because they decided to axe a lot of extensions, and I don't get my way on work Citrix because admins decided which extensions are worthwhile (they block all video stuff, btw).
Your post has no content explaining why you wrote "No."
This is a bad habit that makes your sentiment confusing.
One thing to note, however, is that it must be without sound. Auto playing sound of any sort is complete garbage.
Safari didn't block no-sound-track video for this reason. It's a good reason.