Facebook To Autoplay Videos With Sound On By Default (androidandme.com)

Currently, Facebook videos autoplay on your News Feed as you scroll up and down. While they eat data and various resources, the saving grace is that they are silent -- that is, until now. Facebook has announced several new changes to its video platform today, including a setting that will autoplay videos with sound turned on by default. Android and Me reports: The audio of videos will fade in and out as you're scrolling through your feed. Fortunately, Facebook will at least make it so that audio won't autoplay if your phone is set to silent. If you're not a fan of this change, there will be a setting to turn audio autoplay off. The change is that it will now be on by default for everyone. Other feature introductions are larger previews for vertical videos, a picture-in-picture mode for videos so you can watch and continue scrolling (and even exit the app without interrupting the video on Android), and a Facebook Video app coming to smart TVs.

Comments

Facebook use plummets during business hours

[Qzukk]

Employers rejoice as productivity increases.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[saloomy]

This will just lead to browsers muting sound by default

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[TWX]

Well, normally the means to set the option isn't intuitive.

That said, what is intuitive is leaving one's headphones plugged in 24/7 or turning the main volume down either through the easily located software option on the taskbar or else on the speakers themselves.

I expect that anyone bitten by this will just leave the sound down/off by default. Given the kinds of prank websites that people used to submit in the past that would scream obscenities via flash animation or some other kind of annoyance, I would find it smart to just have the volume down/off by default in a workplace anyway.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[Slashdot Junky]

While you may be correct, all videos, audio, and animated image formats should be click-to-play by default. The move to HTML5 video and audio has been especially annoying for me, because Firefox seems to not support this simple functionality. It is way overdue. My preference is for the elements to not be downloaded until I click play. This isn't limited to ad-related content. A lot of articles, news or not, include video clips that aren't needed since the words are sufficient.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[dgatwood]

Even if it is silent, it is still wasting huge amounts of battery power for content that the user may not even care about. Choose a keyframe that adequately explains the content of the video, and if users want to watch the video, they can click. If a user is too lazy to click to play the video, that user didn't really care about playing it anyway, so playing it was a waste of power.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[reboot246]

When I'm reading news, I tend to open sites in multiple tabs and it's really annoying when two or more of them start playing sounds when I haven't even got to them yet. By the time I've read the content of other sites and get to the racket-makers, they've already finished their annoying videos (or just replaying them over and over!).

At least Firefox has a sound icon on each tab so I can mute the ones I don't want to listen to.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[markdavis]

I have yet to find a single case, ever, that I would think that autoplaying video and/or audio on a website is appropriate. It is just plain, 100% annoying and presumptuous. Offer a NON ANIMATED option to play something and give the user a choice.

Besides being extremely annoying, unwanted video consumes TONS of bandwidth, CPU, and battery on devices.

I absolutely predicted how annoying the web would become when site designers got a hold of these "wonderful" tools that were coming and have been dreading what was coming. We used to be able to stop this crap in its tracks with addons/plugins that restricted Flash, and disable animated GIF's. Those days are now gone. Turn off javascript and 90% of websites just flat out break. Turn off HTML5 video/audio and then you have no access to ANY video/audio.

The web is turning into TV- something for sites to FORCE what they want you to see, they way they want you to see it. Want to use a smaller window for your browser? Well too F'ing bad! Want a nice menu at the top so you can jump to the info you want? Well too F'ing bad! Want to read something without things jumping in front of you over and over? Well too F'ing bad- "we want your feedback" "subscribe!" "take our survey" "click here to chat!!" Want to know how big a page is? Well too F'ing bad- it scrolls forever, adding more and more without warning? Want to just see some actual content? Well too F'ing bad- you have to wade through multi megapixel useless images, sectionalized areas, side scrolling, junk with tons of while space. Want to try and read something without distraction? Well too F'ing bad- every single site has to have animated junk all over it, constantly moving and scrolling. Want to click on something and have instant action because your time is important? Well too F'ing bad- we are going to make EVERYTHING fade in and fade out, scroll in and scroll out. Ug!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, this stuff touched a nerve. A big one.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[DontBeAMoran]

Click-to-play is not enough. We need click-to-download-and-play, because there's a new fad about making 150MB animated GIFs that should be in video format instead. And if we're not planning on watching the GIFs or the videos, it's wasted bandwidth for everyone involved.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[Slashdot Junky]

Yes, it is CLICK-TO-DOWNLOAD-AND-PLAY that I actually want. A video shouldn't be downloaded until the user has clicked such a button. Instead, the website should code in a image such as frame one of the video with a watermark showing something like "click to view video" that is displayed in the browser instead to allow the site's layout and structure to be maintained.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[Your.Master]

Streaming video websites which are opened in the foreground tab of the active window, because visiting those sites is indication of user intent to view the video. That's also, of course, TV-like by design.

There's a fair argument to be made that this is not sufficiently compelling in the fact of sites that want to play annoying bullshit and pretend to be a streaming video website, but I also think this is a legitimate case that we have to acknowledge that we are breaking. There are ways around this, eg. sites like youtube could be on an optional curated whitelisted for play-by-default, or right click the play button and "always play for [domain]" though even that's risky if the bad guys honeypot you once into letting them always play.

If facebook plays video by default, and if I can't change that default, facebook is gone from my use. Unsolicited sound is the worst thing on the web short of actual malware (and sometimes it's part of malware), and it's the thing that made me reinstall adblock after going without it for years since I want the free ad-supported model of much of the Internet to survive, but the bad actors on those sound-by-default sites just overwhelms that desire.

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[davester666]

just another reason to make sure "facebook.com" resolves to 127.0.0.1

Re:Facebook use plummets during business hours

[jenningsthecat]

The move to HTML5 video and audio has been especially annoying for me, because Firefox seems to not support this simple functionality. It is way overdue. My preference is for the elements to not be downloaded until I click play.

Can't help you with click-to-download, but click-to-play, (for some-but-not-all videos), can be turned on by going into 'about:config' and setting 'media.autoplay.enabled' to 'false' . And if you're running Pale Moon, (which you might want to consider if you're sick of Mozilla's idea of UI "innovations" and you also want to kill ALL video autoplay), then you can also set 'media.autoplay.allowscripted' to 'false'. That latter setting doesn't exist in FF as far as I can tell, but it is present in Pale Moon. I set both of the above values in Pale Moon soon after Flashblock started to not work, and now I NEVER experience automatic playing of videos. Add Greasemonkey and an appropriate script, (Startpage is your friend here), and you can also kill YouTube's shitty 'we're always going to play our next recommended video unless you explicitly tell us not to do so every time you open a new tab' behaviour.

I consider the above to be as important as NoScript and an ad blocker when it comes to taking control over my browsing experience away from the fuckwits who run websites and putting it back into my own hands.

Vertical Video

[subk]

Now they're going to *reward* users for shooting fucked up vertical video? How retarded can Facebook get?

Re:Vertical Video

[TWX]

Facebook is running out of new users at their current intelligence level. In order to expand (which apparently is what modern business requires, it's not enough to simply remain the same) they have to figure out how to acquire more and more customers, which means lowering the bar further and further.

I still have to wonder how sound their business model is. Have they actually turned a profit yet?

Re:Vertical Video

[AdamThor]

"I still have to wonder how sound their business model is."

Business model now have sound by default!

Re:Vertical Video

[Gavagai80]

I still have to wonder how sound their business model is. Have they actually turned a profit yet?

Googled that for you. As of November 2nd 2016: "The social media giant said Wednesday that third-quarter revenue soared 56% to $7 billion and its quarterly profit nearly tripled to $2.38 billion"

Sounds like a pretty profitable business model to me.

Time to rename Facebook

[Minupla]

Time to rename Facebook RickRollBook!

Re:That's nice

[Mr D from 63]

Yet another reason to not use facebook.

Yes people like you are too stupid to be able to change a setting and your only option is failure. Obviously even the most simple of tasks is well beyond your capability.

Facebook sucks by default, no settings can change that.

Web don'ts

[Dracos]

Autoplay video has been on every year's "Top 10 Web Don'ts" list since at least 1998. It's the most consistently hated practice since the web began.

Re:Web don'ts

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's the most consistently hated practice since the web began.

Damn kids that don't remember the blink tag

Re:Web don'ts

[Mitreya]

Autoplay video has been on every year's "Top 10 Web Don'ts" list since at least 1998

Topped in the same list only by Autoplay of loud sounds before you can even spot the video on the page.

For some reason there is no obvious browser mechanism to disable sound by default. It's very rare that I want a webpage to be able to speak. So explicit permission would be nice.

Re:Web don'ts

[SeaFox]

Autoplay video has been on every year's "Top 10 Web Don'ts" list since at least 1998.

Why would Facebook care what users think of the practice? They aren't Facebook's customers.

Finally facebook shoots itself in the foot

[Anonymous Coward]

the internet for many years has tolerated a lot of bullshit form web sites, but one remains universally unacceptable, making noise suddenly and without warning.

web pages need to be quiet unless i specifically request they make noise

Fly on the wall.

[Avantare]

Brian: Mark, why don't you make all user submitted video\audio autoplay?
Mark: Great idea Brian. I could then sell 10 second slots to advertisers and precede the user submitted videos.

Later that evening at a different meeting.
Brian: Gentlemen, I want the cap lowered to 768GB's effective immediately in all our markets.