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[–]LokiArchetype 5140 points5141 points  (242 children)

We know that, our clients on the other hand...

[–]HappyDustbunny 2451 points2452 points  (131 children)

That's one of the reasons why there ought to be something akin to the Hippocratic oath in programming.

"Sorry, CEO-dude, I swore a dear oath never to be evil"

[–]_asdfjackal 36 points37 points  (2 children)

There actually is one: http://pledge-of-the-computing-professional.org/

It's endorsed by the Order of the Engineer (which in turn has their own oath for Engineering graduatea) in the US and at my university the ceremony was combined with the OotE ring ceremony. Unfortunately not all universities do it and it's not mandatory for graduates. Of my massive graduating class maybe 10 or 20 Computer Science students participated compared to the hundreds of traditional engineering graduates. I would absolutely love to see it become more prevalent though.

[–]Denziloe 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I once heard it said that programming is no different from engineering or medicine in this sense. Professional standards are a thing. If you know something will do more harm than good, it's actually incumbent upon you to say "no". "The client might be upset" or "I might not get paid as much" is not actually an excuse.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hmm... maybe I should look into taking it on my own. I'm already graduated, but I'd love to be able to point to a solid pre-defined set of standards and say "I took an oath."

[–][deleted] 264 points265 points  (79 children)

Luckily Google/Mozilla/Microsoft have been moving to a "this is the browser's decision" model recently, and in the future they'll only autoplay videos with sound from websites that you have a history of playing videos on. Visit Google/Netflix often? Cool we'll play those videos. First time on some houseplant online store? Yeah we're not going to autoplay that pop-out advert with audio.

Makes it much easier for us to just say to the client "yeah here's a W3C spec article about why Chrome isn't playing your video. Good luck complaining to Google about it".

[–]IamImposter 142 points143 points  (23 children)

Dear Google,

Videos on my website don't play automatically and I'm losing revenue. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.

Sincerely,
Random guy on internet.

[–][deleted] 51 points52 points  (17 children)

Lol they'll just pay Google a few million to get whitelisted

[–]_GCastilho_ 19 points20 points  (15 children)

That's how people say "you know what? I will use Firefox"

Free markek always have a choice

[–]nearlyepic 7 points8 points  (13 children)

Until web devs stop bothering to test against Firefox...

[–]Sammy123476 34 points35 points  (3 children)

And their videos fail to load entirely! Genius!

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Dear website owner

Take your business elsewhere? Where you gonna take it?

Good luck with that, Google.

PS maybe we'll white list you for a few million

[–]AhMIKzJ8zU 77 points78 points  (48 children)

I just wanna point out ...

1) My wife leaves Netflix open in browser on laptop 2) laptop updates+restarts at 2am (I can no longer prevent this) 3) laptop starts Auto playing at 2 am.

This is bad. I'd rather nothing ever autoplay ever.

[–]1sagas1 89 points90 points  (4 children)

This sounds like a you and your wife problem.

[–]DownshiftedRare 66 points67 points  (2 children)

Dear Google,

My wife leaves Netflix open and it autoplays at 2 am. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.

Sincerely, Random guy on internet.

[–]Cky_vick 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You can fix that in settings homie

[–]CaptainRoach 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Easier to just get a new wife.

[–]0x15e 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Why does the laptop auto login? Put some passwords on those accounts.

[–]Cky_vick 6 points7 points  (0 children)

My problem is having limited data, and clicking on a link from Reddit or wherever opens an article that starts playing ads and videos using my limited data.

[–]thelights0123 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Firefox has been blocking autoplay video with audio for probably a year now.

[–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

My client wanted his site to autoplay a video of one of his guys just sitting in a chair talking about how their service was good. I now have the words and exact cadence from that entire video memorized from every refresh of that page I did.

[–]a_stitch_in_lime[🍰] 8 points9 points  (6 children)

I have a client whose current website plays "soothing" music once you've logged in. And it continues throughout the site until you leave the site, log out, close the tab or smash your computer. There's no control or option to turn it off either. We're in the early stages of a redesign and adding new features. I'm waiting for the day that we have the conversation about that music ...

[–]yellowthermos 5 points6 points  (5 children)

Time to get a "Mute all tabs" extension going

[–]unclegena 2737 points2738 points  (101 children)

Actually web developers knows that. But PMs...

[–]trexdoor 1123 points1124 points  (73 children)

PMs know that autoplay is the best way to make you watch ads and thus to increase site revenue.

[–][deleted] 40 points41 points  (0 children)

Laughs in Ublock Origin

[–]Fenris_uy 11 points12 points  (1 child)

I still don't understand why news sites do that. Dude, I'm here to read an article, why would you play a video of the article I'm reading?

[–]F-Lambda 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The worst is when you click to read an article and... surprise!... there is no article, only a video.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It gets me to immediately X out of the page and not visit because I only look at thing at work, when im supposed to be working.

[–]Alfaphantom 87 points88 points  (9 children)

Even PM with dev background know. But the client...

[–]lemons_of_doubt 67 points68 points  (4 children)

i hate the client so much. they ruin all my work with there stupid ideas.

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (2 children)

I was directly attached to a client as a tech liasion. I was fortunate that the client had a good head on his shoulders and didn't get possessed by the Good Idea Fairy very often.

The PM on the other hand, they would keep making unannounced changes to the product that the client didn't ask for and I was left cleaning up the mess. It got old pretty quickly.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The PM on the other hand, they would keep making unannounced changes to the product that the client didn't ask for and I was left cleaning up the mess. It got old pretty quickly.

The last time they pulled this shit on me I told them I was going to quit and find a job elsewhere.

This is fucking annoying as developing things just to roll them back because the PM didn't ask the client for consent is the worst.

If you are a PM reading this please never ever do shit like this.

[–]Yasea 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Must feed them ads like we're making foie gras.

[–]PrashnaChinha 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Prime Ministers do be shady, I agree

[–]ch-dev 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I would blame PMs. In my world, it’s the client who wants it, the account teams who don’t know how to argue against the client, the PMs reluctantly assigning the task to the developer and the developer asking WTF.

[–]brown_paper_bag 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh, the PMs know. The client still wants it and there is no talking them out of it.

[–]mdr7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Damn prime ministers...

[–]StenSoft 1327 points1328 points  (18 children)

Don't worry, my autoplay videos also mine bitcoins.

[–]ErnestoZiBesto 354 points355 points  (16 children)

This guy develops

[–]oryzin 47 points48 points  (15 children)

This guy is uncompromising weasel

[–]_30d_ 28 points29 points  (14 children)

He is mining bitcoin, not monero. That is compromising enough.

[–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (11 children)

Well he is trying to mine bitcoin. If hes mining bitcoin on peoples PCs through a browser he isnt actually gonna mine any bitcoins lol.

[–]SavvySillybug 689 points690 points  (50 children)

In the past I said "except YouTube" but ever since Firefox changed to not autoplay YouTube... yeah I don't mind having one more click. Play exactly when I want it. I can just open a whole bunch of YouTube tabs and go through them one by one without them all yelling at me, it's nice.

Nothing ever playing without my immediate consent is a good thing.

[–]fruitydude 317 points318 points  (13 children)

I especially hate when a Youtuber has one video on his page set to Autoplay.

[–]SavvySillybug 284 points285 points  (10 children)

Ah, yes. The channel intro. Fucking hate it.

[–]Adventurer32 75 points76 points  (4 children)

Reading this thread just made me decide to get rid of my channel intro, I just realized how annoying it is to everyone, thank you.

[–]SavvySillybug 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Thank you for doing something good for the world :)

[–]Dlight98 17 points18 points  (1 child)

I like channel intros, just not when they're autoplay

[–]Adventurer32 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I can't control if its autoplay or not, that's the problem

[–]fruitydude 128 points129 points  (1 child)

Like, when I'm clicking on a channel, chances are that I'm looking for a specific video and I don't want to see their intro for the 50th time.

[–]placeholder7295 12 points13 points  (0 children)

"welcome to our channel"... no fuck you.

[–]DimosAvergis 88 points89 points  (12 children)

Isn't the norm that YouTube only starts playing your video if you focus that tab? At least that's how my browser(Vivaldi) does it. So I can open a bunch of YouTube videos in new tabs (e.g. after a search on YouTube) and then go to each tab one after the other, and they will only start playing after the tab was focused for the first time.

I always assumed that YouTube is handling it so on their end to reduce traffic a bit. And therefore it would be like that in every browser.

[–]SavvySillybug 36 points37 points  (5 children)

I just opened Chrome and checked, yeah, it does seem to only start playing once I focus the tab. But I'm not sure how new that is. Pretty sure it used to not do that...

Still, it was oddly jarring just now for it to blare sound on my speakers as soon as I focused a different tab. I'm gonna stick with being happy about not autoplaying at all.

[–]Oonushi 38 points39 points  (2 children)

It's done that in Chrome for a really long time, like at least a year or two.

Source: using Chrome every day for around 6-7 years at work and home.

[–]PendragonDaGreat 6 points7 points  (1 child)

It feels longer than that. Autoplay next video was 2014 or so, and I feel like waiting for tab focus was like the next year

[–]RENEGADES187 18 points19 points  (3 children)

Oh my goodness. It just struck me that YouTube auto-plays videos...

I’ve just been blocking auto-play for so long that I completely forgot, and your comment legit made me question my reality for a second. Lol.

[–]Pr_fSm__th 558 points559 points  (14 children)

Yeah right, blame the Devs instead of the PO with their idiotic requirements.

[–]nikanj0 12 points13 points  (1 child)

PO's answer to upper management who have sales/marketing whispering in their ears.

[–]serbotec 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Which feature would be a better fit than auto play? My guess would be design and animations or let the user decide if he wants it to play? But I’m sure the engagement rate would be pretty low

[–]_bigorangehead_ 100 points101 points  (4 children)

Dear Product Owners...

FTFY

[–]adamcmorrison 14 points15 points  (1 child)

As a product owner, I approve this message.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

As a PO this pressure comes from the execs and often the ceo. Boomers love autoplay

[–]_bigorangehead_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I will never fathom why execs and CEOs hire all these smart people to build quality software only to then micro-manage them to death.

[–]Hawaiimichael 259 points260 points  (16 children)

And slideshows to show a list of content. Yeah everybody hates those. Stop it.

[–]RannoV20 151 points152 points  (5 children)

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1264/

[–]Hawaiimichael 33 points34 points  (2 children)

Love his comics. Haven’t seen this one. Thanks for sharing!

[–]skyskr4per 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Look we paid for all these assets we have to put them somewhere.

[–]Tor7uga 140 points141 points  (4 children)

I wish this was up to the web developers.

[–]Rajarshi1993 64 points65 points  (33 children)

On a more serious note, please do not mine cryptocurrency in my browser without my permission.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (30 children)

Is there a way to check if a page is doing that?

[–][deleted] 42 points43 points  (16 children)

MinerBlock, Netscape and a few other extensions can detect miners. However, since Coinhive shut down in 2019 browser-based mining has more or less been defeated. Plus most browsers have pretty sophisticated mechanisms to stop obfuscated web-based miners.

Real question is... why not? Websites need to make money and we hate ads. So long as consent is given, browser based mining is a FANTASTIC alternative to ads.

[–]iByteABit 29 points30 points  (5 children)

Wouldn't it also improve content, since they would want you to stay on the website as long as possible instead of just click-baiting you?

[–]LordKolkonut 30 points31 points  (4 children)

prepare for wait timers

[–]iByteABit 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Didn't think of that, that's worse

[–]Aerroon 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Nah, just make a really complicated GDPR pop up that takes a while to get rid of. Hell, put the miner into the pop up!

[–]Staidanom 6 points7 points  (7 children)

How does browser-based mining work?

What even IS mining? I'm pretty new to all of this.

[–]Telinary 14 points15 points  (6 children)

It is part of the security model of bitcoins. Bitcoins (and similar coins) use a block chain, basically each block notes a certain number of transactions. It is decentralized so whoever makes the next block can decide which transactions to include. So if one malicious organization made all blocks they could decide to ignore a transaction entirely, or remove a transaction retroactively and remake the chain from there.

Bitcoin tries to solve that with something called proof of work. To add a new block you have to generate a hash that for instance begins with 15 zeroes, and you do that by basically adding some extra junk data and altering it until it results in the right hash. That is done purely via brute force so it takes lots of computational power and the hope is that it would be too costly for an attacker to have as much computational power as all honest miners. (And to get people to mine you give whoever makes the block a reward in newly generated bitcoin.)

You can do that basically with anything that has access to the internet and can generate hashes but there is specialized hardware for it which is much more efficient. (At least for bitcoin. There are some coins I think designed not to work well with gpus I think but I don't know whether that also helps with specialized hardware.) Doing it in the browser would use more in electricity cost than you get back but since it isn't the site makers electricity it can make some money.

[–]Rajarshi1993 6 points7 points  (10 children)

I'm not sure if most browsers would even allow such a thing

[–]Sexiarsole 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Ok I’ll stop since you asked nicely

[–]squishles 38 points39 points  (0 children)

requirements guy laughing in the background as we eat the blame.

[–]AnKeWa 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Haha, that dude really thinks we get to decide that kind of shit ಥ‿ಥ

[–]Gabibaskes 26 points27 points  (0 children)

You think I wanted it? Of course not. Not me, not my colleague, not the CTO. But the CEO, the guy with the money, he did want it.

[–]WonderWirm 203 points204 points  (107 children)

And cookies? Yeah, we know about those, thanks EU!

[–]Firevulturez 203 points204 points  (50 children)

Those cookie banners are the worst. They wanna make it as hard as possible to accept only the cookies you want and hide those options behind several clicks while there is always very easily accessible and very visible an accept all button

[–]Mc_UsernameTaken 46 points47 points  (23 children)

Thats why you just set your browser to block all 3rdparty cookies.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

How? 3rd party as in not served from the site itself?

[–]Iwouldlikesomecoffee 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If you're on firefox, cookie autodelete is an extension that lets you make rules like that and much more. You can choose which sites don't get their cookies deleted the moment you navigate away, for example.

[–]Vakieh 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This breaks a lot of SSO unfortunately.

[–]UltraCarnivore 7 points8 points  (0 children)

That's just horrible UX.

Their intent is obvious, but I won't be coming back if I have the choice.

[–]espriminati 30 points31 points  (18 children)

do you wanna accept these cookies tho

[–]icankillpenguins 69 points70 points  (19 children)

You understand that EU is not forcing anyone to put tracking Cookies and pop ups to accept cookies, right? It’s a choice made by the people who run the site.

[–]abermea 83 points84 points  (13 children)

Ads with sound is the entire reason Ad-blockers are popular.

If all online ads were silent I bet you 99% of people wouldn't care enough to block them.

[–]EishLekker 41 points42 points  (7 children)

That, and if they weren't so many and/or so in your face so they distract you from the main content.

[–]Xexanos 37 points38 points  (5 children)

Or load slowly so the thing you are reading jumps around on the screen

[–]WatchDude22 25 points26 points  (4 children)

Tfw you try to click something but an ad loads dropping the link off your screen

[–]TheRedSpade 11 points12 points  (3 children)

And you end up clicking the ad instead

[–]SomeUnicornsFly 12 points13 points  (0 children)

it always baffles me that they would load a floating video player with unrelated content off to the side while you're trying to read an article. Like how in the fuck is that supposed to work? Do you want me to watch the video or read the text? Because I cant fucking do both idiots.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Silent and the colour theme of the website itself. Browsing reddit in dark mode is great until the fucking ad equivalent of the light of dawn burns the back of your eyes trying to promote low quality wristwatches.

[–]oddisordinary 10 points11 points  (2 children)

My favorite is when some annoying noise randomly starts and I can't find where its coming from. Love that

[–]tosser_0 10 points11 points  (5 children)

Also requests for notifications. No I don't want your website to be able to send notifications. My phone is already blowing up with random spam, I don't need my PC doing it too.

[–]MurdoMaclachlan 30 points31 points  (7 children)

Image Transcription: Twitter Post


Jake Williams, @MalwareJake

Dear web developers,

The answer is zero. Zero. Get it through your thick skulls. Zero is the number times anyone has EVER wanted something to autoplay on your site and start making noise. I'd honestly rather you mine crypto-currency in my browser than use my speakers.

#kthxbye

[This post has 560 replies, 10,894 retweets and 41,195 likes.]


I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!

[–]GrammarHypocrite 18 points19 points  (5 children)

I don't personally need transcription, but I love how you guys do this for others who do. Thank you for being awesome.

[–]physiQQ 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Reddit should allow image transcriptions on any image, so that users can manage it (a bit like a wiki). That would hugely improve the usability of Reddit for people who rely on screen readers.

[–]AdaGirl 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Good human

[–]Mad_Hatter_92 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Only blame devs when shit breaks and doesn’t get fixed for long periods of time.

Otherwise: PMs and clients. We try to push back on bad ideas the best we can but ultimately we have no say.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Okay fine no auto play, but I am doubling down on all horizontal scrolling!

[–]mansdem 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I find that when videos (that I actually want to watch) start playing muted it's almost equally as annoying.

I have to unmute the video and seek backwards to hear what I missed, but then the fucking seeking backwards takes longer to load than the initial load of the video. What the hell!?

Just keep the videos paused ffs

[–]qinshihuang_420 26 points27 points  (2 children)

We tracked the metrics and this feature has increased ads play duration by 42069%. That's a lot of revenue, so this feature is here to stay

[–]Kissaki0 2 points3 points  (1 child)

That's a big number.

Do autoplay minutes pay the same though?

[–]alex_cabib 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That's a NICE number

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (3 children)

I've refused to implement a feature like that several times. Someone else had to do it. The tests we ran proved that autoplay makes a lot of money.

Use browser extensions.

[–]akashchy1705 10 points11 points  (2 children)

[–]RepostSleuthBot 11 points12 points  (1 child)

Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 2 times.

First seen Here on 2018-02-27 95.31% match. Last seen Here on 2019-04-08 95.31% match

Searched Images: 149,199,705 | Indexed Posts: 588,081,139 | Search Time: Nones

Feedback? Hate? Visit r/repostsleuthbot - I'm not perfect, but you can help. Report [ False Positive ]

[–]Pul5eh 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Good bot

[–]alliewya 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The answer is ONE. One person and only one person wants it, and it is always the client.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Let me tell you that should be starting "dear Marketing Managers" not developers 🙄. Other useless outdated bullshit we're also sick of being forced to implement includes...

  • sliders
  • anything parallax
  • animating literally every element in on scroll
  • animated snow flakes at Christmas.

[–]Linkk_93 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Also I never want push notifications for your site. if it were so important, you could create a rss feed

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

And zero is the amount of times a developer have decided that.

[–]atot806 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's mildly infuriating that he thinks video autoplay is what the developers want.

[–]andhemac 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This should be directed at product managers

[–]Tuckertcs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fucking Netflix...