Mastodawn

I really really don't even understand the web anymore. It feels like at least half of all news articles I read have *unrelated* videos either at the top of the page or in the middle somewhere, which all start auto-playing when the page loads (with sound off, fortunately).

Why? I'm there reading an article, I'm not gonna look at the video -- certainly not gonna un-mute it. Yes, sometimes I'll take the time to kill it, but most of the time it just gets ignored.

Why, Why, Why, Why are websites doing this? Instead of delivering a few kilobytes of text, they're all set up to put that text on the screen while also streaming many... tens? hundreds? of megabytes of just garbage that isn't being viewed by anyone.

Why the hell is this happening? Is there some perverse motive I don't understand?

Is this to fake things up for investors saying that all this video content is "delivered to viewers" or something?

What is the deal here?

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Carter Temm Jun 4

@stevenaleach This 100%. And then you have the adds, which OK put food on the table, but most implementations seem to enjoy annoyingly sending keyboard focus all over the place. Or the related posts/videos/links smack dab in the middle of the article I happen to be reading.

None of these encourage content consumption. I too feel like I am missing something when 150KB turns into 2MB turns into 4.

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Steven A. Leach

@cartertemm I at least understand the motive for ads... (not that I'd ever tolerate them if they *did* manage to sneak past my ad blockers). But I don't understand the motive or idea for all the auto-playing muted videos.

Go to Huffington Post (as just one easy example site) and click on any article you'd like. There's the text you wanna read, right under a muted video at the top that'll play (and move on through a playlist or random shuffle of more videos) while you're reading.

You'll probably have scrolled down to bring the first line of text to the top of the screen of course so you won't *see* them playing, but there will be videos playing at the top of every article you read on #HuffPost.

I just don't get it. At all. That's just dumb.

It costs them money, it drives up hosting costs. It requires a ton of bandwidth that they're wasting.

There's gotta be something going on here that I just don't get -- some motive that makes this make sense, 'cause it's *most* news pages that are doing this now.

Why are they wasting so much bandwidth (theirs and mine)?

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Steven A. Leach Jun 4

@cartertemm Even worse: I tend to leave a lot of tabs open with articles I've finished reading as well as lots of open tabs with stuff I haven't even read yet.

And a lot of the time those tabs will be going through a playlist/random shuffle of muted videos that no one is watching.

Like the Huffington Post article that needled me into this whole rant to begin with -- It's a few tabs away from the active tab I'm here typing in. And I can keep checking on it at random and it's on a different video every time... not even on screen. Just playing videos 'cause it's how websites are done now.

Why?

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Carter Temm Jun 4

@stevenaleach Oh man, now you've got me wondering how much smaller my bookmark archive would be if not for these... Features, I guess?
I mean 2MB doesn't sound like a lot, until you have hundreds of articles that you want to preserve.

As an aside, I just tried loading a HuffPost article into archive.is and saw over 500 different requests before I gave up and closed the window. This has got to be one of the worst offenders for sure.

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Carter Temm Jun 4

@stevenaleach Probably tech debt from all the third-party ads, analytics, engagement telemetry, tracking, fonts, scripts, and media (both the stuff you care about and the stuff you don't). where third party CDNs are not used, they probably more than break even on bandwidth by selling your data and/or optimizing their campaigns based on metrics provided by these widgets. Given a tradeoff between UX versus monetization and feature complexity, the latter seems to always win.

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Steven A. Leach Jun 4

@cartertemm I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about literal web design -- as in what to put in front of the reader/viewer...

I'm talking about putting big boxes with video players onto pages with what are otherwise text articles.

Like literally any article on Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/screwworm-livestock_n_6a20dc6ce4b032392fa9476c

There's an article about Screwworm. It's about 4kb of text. But there at the top is the video player that is on every page 'cause that's just how HF has decided to decorate their pages....

The whole time I've been typing this, it's been playing videos in another tab where I loaded the Screwfly article and then copied the URL to come back to this tab and start typing.

Tab's still open and several videos have played at this point... why? For who?

Is there some benefit for them being able to show that all this video content is being played on folks' computers?

Is that used to sell the ads my ad blocker removes and I never see anyway?

Is there some motive for spending all the extra money on server capacity and bandwidth and pumping out videos that play in every open HF tab on everyone's machine and which play muted so no one even knows they're happening? That are just there above articles that we went there for?

What is going on here?

Officials Have A Suspected Case Of The New World Screwworm Fly In South Texas, The USDA Says

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that it suspects that the New World screwworm fly has arrived in south Texas.

HuffPost