Autoplay is a cancer that spread across the popular media platforms. Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix seem to have all abandoned the idea that the app shouldn't play distracting video and sound without prompting. (I haven't checked Hulu in years, I don't know what they're up to.)

Remember when it was annoying pop-ups that auto-played video and sound? Now it's a feature to extract as many watch-time minutes from users as possible. I guarantee it's all A/B testing looking for a few points of uptick in watch time.

Just yesterday, I found that YouTube on my TV reenabled auto-play on it's own even though I disabled it long ago. Even though I doubt it was intentional, I found this incredibly frustrating.

How could it be unintentional? At best it was a deliberate ignorance of the consequences of a settings schema upgrade. Just like how bank errors always are in favor of the bank.

Realistically... Very easily? The default is to have auto-play on, I can imagine many scenarios where settings get lost. I've not heard general outcry about this so my best guess is that it's an edge case.

I know a few other cases regarding auto-play and youtube too.

I've had it re-enable itself a few times. I'm sure it's due to the extra add-ons and such I use that's messing with it. A few of my friends don't use the same add-ons I use, or they don't use any and have had it happen enough times for them to complain to me about it.

My friend first found out his auto-play was re-enabled after youtube ate up most of his monthly bandwidth cap in one night.

So we're definitely in the minority, but it does seem to happen to different people with very different configurations.

Twitch auto played when it was embedded on a website and used 6GB before I realized causing my internet to be shaped. Fortunately it was only a couple of days before the quota refreshed. I now block the ttvnw.net domain using a browser addon.

Disabling autoplay completely is a better bet. They aren't the only ones that will do that to you and you'll be fighting it the rest of your life.

There is none of this nonsense on Hulu (from my phone to Chromecast). I recently dropped Netflix for Hulu simply because of the more interesting portfolio.

Same here. I literally found myself scrolling Netflix for many, many minutes on end. It essentially became Facebook. I don’t know if the issue is their catalog has expanded with so many originals that it’s hard to find something to watch and or that not having ratings (to tell if something sucks) me to not watch.

Sure they have some stellar content but they also have a lot of crap.

The fact that Netflix no longer has a rating system is quite sad. That was one of the high points of Netflix back in the day - the ability to read reviews of shows/movies before committing to them. Now everything has to be “recommended” to me.

IMHO most of Netflix's catalogue is crap... Or their recommender system just doesn't get me. It seems to have overfit on anime, even though I just watched a couple a long time ago.

The Hulu Originals, as sparse as they are, are outstanding across the board. It's like the early days of Netflix Originals.

Plus if I want to watch current TV or more recent shows alongside originals it’s available on Hulu. Netflix has lost a lot of the more bingeable shows and it really doesn’t have any current content.

I get that Netflix is a different beast than Hulu in many ways. But for cord cutters Hulu feels more like the total package.

But then you have to watch commercials in the middle of the content - that's worse to me, paying money for the service and still getting commercials.

Hulu without commercials doesn’t have commercials in the middle of content.

I pay for Hulu (it costs about as much as Netflix I think) and there are no commercials, unless you're watching content from one of their partners.

Hulu doesn't auto-play.

Their horror is an awful text heavy interface with 5 inch size font on my TV.

My pet peeve with their horrific UI is that rather than underlining what you have selected they _overline_ it.

> Remember when it was annoying pop-ups that auto-played video and sound?

I remember even further back when the internet put users in control.

Hulu does have autoplay, at least on the Android TV app, which is why we use it much more than we do Netflix. If there weren’t a few Netflix original shows which my wife and I really enjoy, we’d cancel our subscription.

You mean doesn't?

Oops... yes, I meant “Hulu does not have autoplay”

Too late to edit unfortunately

For me there is definitely a bit of a "hype gap" for most shows on Netflix and those previews make it a bit smaller. A title and some random faces just don't get me interested in anything. I remember actually wishing for trailers on more than one occasion.

But it's easy for me to not get upset about auto-playing trailers because my primary client never got updated to support them.

One thing I'm always reminded of when I hear about an HN reader bemoaning a feature/policy: Behind every feature change (like auto plays), there's a product manager who's tested changes to show that it maximizes some short-term metric.

Users get the products they "want", not what they need — or deserve:

Make Something People Need

> We are surrounded by well engineered — and increasingly addictive — technology that shapes what we do and how we think. Especially when you work at a large tech company, how do you trade giving users what they want and your own business’s profitability, with the negative effects that this leads to?

https://www.nemil.com/musings/make-something-people-need.htm...

>Behind every feature change (like auto plays), there's a product manager who's tested changes to show that it maximizes some short-term metric.

Or some director/executive who insists a pet personal preference be added to the product despite protestations from the entire team.

Hello, Snapchat UI redesign.

>I find it very obnoxious how the Netflix app for Apple TV autoplays previews of titles when you’re browsing and doesn’t let you disable that behaviour. As a result I rarely open Netflix except when I already know what I want to watch.

I suspect it's a result of poorly done UX research.

If you frame the question as "How can we increase engagement with the homescreen", adding noise does increase engagement.

Basically the % of people interacting with the home screen increases, but the number of people viewing the home screen decreases.

Ironically this means less time spent exploring...

Netflix often generates some interesting micro-genres and I used to scroll through a bit looking for things to add to my list - now if I don't have a specific title in mind I don't open Netflix at all.

Though I'm not sure I should complain - less mindless watching has lead to me reading more research papers and news. Being more productive.

The whole point is for users to spend less time exploring so they don't realize the selection of decent content is actually quite limited. Netflix doesn't care if people don't like it as long as they keep paying for a subscription. People will complain about this but not cancel the subscription. People will cancel the subscription if there's no content.

>The whole point is for users to spend less time exploring so they don't realize the selection of decent content is actually quite limited.

I actually disagree. I think Netflix has several massive troves. For example I recently worked my way through Frasier, then Cheers. There's a lot of hit shows like Star Trek, Friends, Buffy etc.

I agree the selection is not perfect, but for me, there's a lot of stuff that I wanted to check out in the 90s but was too lazy to monitor a VCR for. There's also a decent enough amount of original content - Black Miror, Bojack for example, that make me feel I get my money's worth.

Maybe it's a generational thing... Netflix has so much more than any Blockbuster.

If not Netflix, what service? Who has better selection? Who is their rival.

IMHO Netflix is getting better at creating great content - Bojack Horseman for example is superb. They have the name brand recognition. And at the end of the day, the price is right - people can justify 12 bucks a month.

IMHO Netflix's rival is not Hulu or Prime Video - it's the local library. Many library systems nowadays offer DVDs and BluRays. Why pay a monthly fee when you can get the same titles from the library as fast as you could. Basically, people may be willing to trade cost for speed. (Heck sometimes I can get things faster from the library than I can from my DVD plan)

My wife hates this behaviour because you never know when it's going to show previews for intense thriller or even horror content. It's bizarre that they would show this to an account which has literally only ever been used to watch Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Gilmore Girls, and similar shows.

Gives you an idea of well recommendation engines work in the general case.

I think the issue is that the autoplaying background promotions have nothing to do with the recommendations— it's mostly just Netflix pushing their exclusive content.

Same with Netflix app on Roku. I keep keep using up/down/left/right to keep stuff from playing, which is pretty silly that I have to do that to keep stuff from playing. I'm trying to use my own attention to read title and try to make a decision and it's trying to blast unwanted information at me.

Maybe trying up/up/down/down/left/right/left/right will do the trick?

Where are the A B and Start buttons on the Roku remote?

The original remote was intended to serve as a gamepad which is why it had a D-pad instead of a five-way.

What’s a five-way?

up/down/left/right/push

Sounds like that will unlock some cheat code feature!

Exactly. It levels you up so you no longer have to deal with the autoplay bosses.

Not only that, the previews make noise. So if you leave it alone for a second it will start blasting sound at you.

Yes, the autoplay preview is very annoying, but I also find annoying the little information provided in the thumbnail gallery. To see more info about a title, you have to select the thumb to go to a full screen view of the title. Except now the actual video starts to play even though there is clearly a play button that was not clicked. At this point, all the play button does is hide the overlay. The buttons have no real meaning/purpose.

And I don't understand the economics of this at all. Don't they pay for bandwidth? Shoving out crap that no one asked for costs Netflix money, doesn't it?

So why do they do it? What's the business case? I know they aren't idiots over there. What do they know that the rest of us don't?

Are the content producers actually paying them to force-feed those previews?

This is the heart of the net neutrality debate, is it not? ISPs claim that Netflix doesn’t pay for all the infrastructure required to carry their bandwidth.

They don't pay for preferential treatment at the expense of other users -- and they shouldn't -- but they pay for the bandwidth they consume just like you and I have to. Otherwise we'd all have OC3840 connections running to our basements.

The argument I heard, at least from Netflix, was that it basically forced users to discover content they wouldn’t otherwise.

They are probably right and have data to back it up but I find that “feature” to be extremely anti-user. It shows utter contempt for user preference.

I doubt they're right, and/or I doubt they told you the truth. This feature actively impairs discoverability by putting the user in a Skinner box where they have to push a button, repeatedly, to make the negative conditioning stop. In my household, it mainly serves to make us "discover" what's on Amazon Prime Video instead.

Of course, many of Netflix's UI features have historically been engineered to make it hard to tell just how limited their selection really is, so autoplay does fit that pattern, at least.

I have given up and just not used Netflix before because of that awful obnoxious feature. There's nowhere you can navigate to in that app that doesn't play video, with sound - except presumably settings, but that doesn't help me choose a show. Awful, anti-user design. I hope the trend of people consciously fighting back against deliberately addictive apps continues. Personally I'm putting my smartphone in a safe next week and getting a crappy Nokia and seek g how long I can go.

Horrible anti-user bullshit. Tempts one to hoist the black flag.

I can’t agree more with you, worse, due to audible auto play, I can’t stand browsing through their TV app at all.

The best Netflix interface is the one Apple designed for them on the Apple TV 1-3. I’m considering dusting it up just for Netflix.

Adding to wishlist: rotten tomatoes and IMDb score of each movie clearly visible when browsing in addition to Netflix rating. Maybe with a link back to IMDb/rt/... It’s infuriating that I need to have laptop or phone with me when browsing movies to see how they are rated.

Ps. Agree with everything you and parent said!

The IMDB scores are one of the biggest benefits of the Amazon UI. The ratings are actually meaningful unlike the totally useless Netflix ratings. Netflix ratings typically range from baffling to insulting.

Firefox has a plugin that shows ratings inside Netflix: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/film-scores-f...

Netflix knows that a huge chunk of their television shows are low quality garbage.

They will never expose an outside review system.

God, the new Netflix plays that godawful loud noise on startup and there are no settings to tell it to shut the fuck up.

But somehow Hulu is worse so there’s no impetus to clean up.

We have decided to cancel a few streaming services and Netflix is the first to go. It literally gives me anxiety to open it as I feel like I have to flip through it so fast to avoid the previews.

I don't like opening it because of the startup sound. That DUN DUN bass punch.

My “smart” TV is really a dumb, laggy POS and that DUN DUN is completely unpredictable. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it is lagged, sometimes it doesn’t, if we have the sonos bar turned up, wooo buddy it will make your heart skip a beat.

> As a result I rarely open Netflix except when I already know what I want to watch

You'd be better off getting rid of Netflix altogether. The acceleration of addictiveness[1] caused by tech companies making their platforms ever more sticky is anti-human.

If there is a film/series you really need to watch, there's always Bit Torrent.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

This behavior is not confined to Apple TV. Isn't it the same on every client? Roku and the web interface are both guilty as well.

It's so obnoxious that I would consider paying extra to 1) shut this off, and 2) have a sane implementation of some sort of helpful/powerful search filter.

i end up waving my mouse around like a spaz to find a place where something isn't auto-previewing. I like the idea of a mouse over preview, but it needs work

Put the cursor at the far right edge of the screen, where it will still scroll the movies but won’t trigger the hover auto play.

That decision alone makes me want to cancel Netflix. I’m close. I hate that feature. Zero reason they can’t let you toggle that off, they just have no respect for users.

At the very least, it shouldn’t auto-play the audio, only the video.

Netflix app on the Roku does the same. Quite annoying when you’re paused on the interface for a little bit and then all of a sudden something plays/roars at high volume.

I just put it on mute before I open the app.

This right here. Doesn’t completely solve the problem, but at least gets rid of the obnoxious sound.

This is my favorite feature, though I agree it should be a setting.