STOP with the videos in news articles!

[Sacred Jellybean]

News articles online are getting more crowded than ever. You've got ads running down both side margins ("THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK SHOWS IF YOU HAVE TOENAIL FUNGUS" is a weirdly common one), ads between paragraph of content, then usually some kind of banner that grays out the whole page and tries to get you to sign up for some mailing list. Does that actually work? Has anyone in the history of internet browsing EVER actually put their e-mail address in one of those goddamn things?

Anyway, the trend continued to get annoying when videos were inserted into the page, usually at the top of the article. That's well and good, I won't begrudge a person if they'd rather watch the story instead of read it. But then, the bastards started auto-playing. Cut that out! I'm impatient, and reading is much quicker than watching, not to mention that it's easier to skip over the fluff.

But now... NOW... as soon as you scroll past the video, it shrinks and drops down to the side of the page. "Hang on a second there, Beanjo!" it says. "You must not have seen, there's a VIDEO up in this mother fucker. Here, I'll just leave it right here for you so you can correct this glaring oversight." Then it autoplays a car commercial. Stop it!

[Sacred Jellybean]

AHHH!!! It happened again! I was upstairs, then heard some commotion down at the computer. I come down, and a news article... one that was open for about 20 minutes... decided it was the right time to try to bait me back in. With, by the way, a video of a news article that I already read, and just didn't bother closing.



You're killing me, smalls!

[Dark Jaguar]

I share your pain. Autoplaying videos embedded in pages of all stripes should go away. Chrome does let you "mute" individual tabs, but seriously, I often read news on my phone these days and I REALLY don't need extra bandwidth eaten up when I didn't ask for it.

As for those "one weird trick" ads... they seem to be badly drawn, as if to say "Hey, don't worry, Don Draper isn't manipulating you, this was made by amateurs like you! Trust us, because we're you!". The ones that really annoy me are the ones with those ultra fast animations of someone like... twisting some sort of engine part. It does something weird to me mentally and I suddenly feel like everything's going WAY too fast in my reality and I gotta calm down. I have no idea what that's about. It's the mundanity of those weird motions that get me. They aren't actually doing anything, they're just like... handling something... Also, there's those ads with the "you won't believe this trick" and then they show some normal photo with some arbitrary part circled and a finger pointing to it. Like, those ones that say "an amazing trick to speed up your computer" and it shows someone picking at the Z key on their laptop keyboard, as though engineers put a "go faster" button under that key to hide it. (And... users are going around plucking keys off their laptop keyboards now, which usually breaks it due to how laptop keys work.)

[A Black Falcon]

http://tcforums.com/forums/showthread.ph...rnet-today

I made a thread complaining about how terrible autoplay videos are last year (link above), so yeah, I entirely agree with you, SJ. Autoplay videos on news pages are terrible and annoying, and it is getting maybe even worse now thanks to things like autoplay videos on sidebars, some of which even play with adblock enabled...

To update what I said in my thread from last year, this new computer does run videos a lot better than the last one so at least I don't have those constant browser-lockup problems anymore, but even so they're really annoying.

[Dark Jaguar]

Adblock sold out. They're selling ad space to advertisers so they promise that they won't get blocked. They've screwed over both big and small with that decision. We don't get the blocker we thought we were getting, and they're more or less extorting the ad companies with such a system in place.