yes it's both visually distracting and an annoying waste of bandwidth for no purpose >🙁

autoplay muted video has its place in content that i actually want to see, but not in the background

(and animated ads can just FOAD)

My pet peeve regarding website video seems to be the little box of a video that you never started nor want to pay attention to, that follows you as you scroll down the article.

If I had started the video and it decides to follow me around it's not a problem.

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That said (reading some comments made me understand the original idea better) animations are generally distracting and having like a short video clip just for the sake of making the site feel "alive" is not a good idea imo.

it's a very quick shorthand to communicate "I don't care about your internet bandwidth or your attention self-moderation. It's about what *I*, John Q. Website, want."

It's the easiest thing in the world to wait for a cue that the user specifically wants the video to play, and the website *knows* they don't have that consent, or they wouldn't have muted it. They know. So it's about seeing how far they can push boundary they're aware of.

I frequently get visual migraines... when things move around on a website I am incredibly annoyed and more often than not as soon as something moves I close the site.

For me it's an accessibility thing, and it makes me feel like the company doesn't give a shit about people tbh.

I find it distracting, like with anything else that is at the edge of my perception trying to get my attention and that I haven’t activated, when I’m trying to do something.

In the case of video it also kind of shows a disregard for my situation. I could be under a phone data plan that I didn’t want to waste on random video streams. @sindarina

How it makes me feel in the moment varies.

If I am okay health wise, and at my computer, I am annoyed, since I have video play turned off in my browser.

If I have a migraine, it may mean I have to go lay down in a dark room instead of at least reading.

On my ipad is worse. I often use my ipad in the dining room, and I don' know what that video is, and don't want other people to see it thinking I approve of it. (Sorry too many in game ads have been XXX rated lately).

I have often left sites if they have a video, especially if the video pops out and follows the mouse around the screen.

Unless I am on a physical therapy site, or YouTube, I am almost never looking for video.

Ten degrees of vision, hearing loss, and migraines do that to you.

Muted is better than not muted (looking at you, news websites) but unless you're a video site and I went looking, autoplay is still bad manners.

I find it annoying at best, distracting and frustrating at worst, like the site owner feels they have to rattle something shiny at me instead of allowing me to focus on the text block I came for.

If I can't close the autoplay video or make it stop, I have been known to either leave and find the information elsewhere, or locate its DOM element and block it programatically.

Yes, it bothers me because there's *motion happening*. Our eyes are literally hardwired to detect motion (like, there are cells *in the retina* that detect motion before the impulses even make it to the brain!). That makes motion very difficult to ignore.

If I wanted to watch a video, I'd have clicked on something that looked like a play button. If I didn't do that, I don't want the site playing video. It pisses me off, and if I can't make it stop, I'll just leave.

i dont want anything to autoplay muted or not UNLESS its a video watching site and I explicitlyclicked the video. I also do not i want the video to follow me as a I scroll.

If the article is text based, keep the video optional

anger at wasting my bandwidth, especially if I'm on my mobile data on my phone, which in South Africa is not cheap.

That's followed by bewilderment at who would find it a useful addition to a webpage.

frustrated, annoyed, Yet Another Thing that I want to turn off but cannot.

I would avoid the website unless forced.

The only exception that I've come across are well designed pixel gif loops in a background, where the movement is limited to usually a corner of the screen, maybe some things like a shooting star rarely, and not distracting, just fun. Doesn't have to be pixel art specifically but that's what it mostly is.

But specifically muted videos have never been a good experience. I also get frustrated that I have been loading /that/ on my machine. Sometimes it lags the entire webpage, too.

@stephaniepixie

i usually immediately close the page. Elements like that are viscerally uncomfortable to me - they're intensely distracting; they make it fucking impossible to concentrate on the actual content; and I feel great resentment towards the company and the designer for having inflicted this on me when I was just trying to access information that I, presumably, needed.

It's a huge insult to anyone with adhd or on a low-bandwidth connection.

yes, it bothers me quite a bit. In brief:

• I find it visually distracting
• It consumes bandwidth, often enough to make the page load painfully slowly
• If I am on a metered connection (e.g. mobile data), it consumes my data to load something I don't want
• If I cannot make it stop, it feels like a violation of consent
• For all these reasons, I am immediately frustrated if I encounter autoplaying video of any kind, and most often close the page and don't attempt to view it again

Such autoplay videos makes it basically impossible for me to use the website. Best case scenario (from website point of view) is that I get very annoyed and find a way to stop the video. Worst case (common) is that I just close the page right away.

My browser is set up to tell the website that I don’t like/deal well with motion (via the CSS reduce motion property) so there is no excuse for that kind of behaviour.

PS I consider it a severe accessibility problem with such videos.

Something moving on one part of the screen makes it pretty much impossible for me to look at, read or pay attention to any other part.

If I can't stop it, close it, scroll it away or cover it with my hand, I generally just abandon that site.

Absolutely intolerable, and I immediately leave the site

Like most people on this planet, I access the internet on a device with minimal computational power, on a network with minimal bandwidth

My computer can simply can't handle playing a background audio or video file and also scroll smoothly or handle clicks on the web page

I also might be trying to view the page in an environment where flickering light or sound would bother other people or critters. Or me

And, the biggest reason of all: It's consent violation

yes it bothers me because (as far as I know) even small movement like a video playing will negate lots of power saving features. So it will keep the CPU and or GPU busy and eat battery slash power while it's visible. Plus accessibility concerns

I usually make freakishly barren web pages for print-friendliness. My worst pages look like income tax forms, but they load fast and run great

Oh! Also, since video is Big, a background video will either waste your server's bandwidth, or 🧵

Absolutely not bothered unless it is an advertisement. Also, sometimes I’m okay with audio at the same time as I scroll. It just needs to smoothly mute/unmute as one video is out of frame and another is in.

In a perfect world, the autoplay will have subtitles so I can read some content without having to unmute.

Anyone complaining should just be directed to tuning their browser settings to ignore autoplay.

It's distracting, and it makes me think that the website's owner cares more about making the site look like it has a high production value than about efficient communication. Unless the website has a specifically artistic purpose (e.g. it's an in-browser video game or a humor site or something), I generally am accessing the site with a specific purpose in mind, e.g. looking for particular pieces of information or filling out a form. A background video does nothing but distract me and possibly slow the page's load time.

I feel similarly about that thing some news sites started doing a few years ago, where scrolling down on a long form news article plays an animation rather than actually scrolling. It feels like a gimmick that just disorients me and makes it hard to "find my place" again if I have to pause reading and come back to it later. (Here's an example of what I mean from The Onion: theonion.com/the-best-books-to…)

I honestly hate it because if I visit a website for written content, I don't want to be bothered by a video (muted or otherwise). I use extensions to block this garbage...It tells me a lot about sites that choose to try to evade my blocking software.

That they are SEOmaxxing peeps who don't care about my desires, CPU, or bandwidth. They want to grow into a massive digital presence to snuff out any competition. Its nasty behavior.

I regard it the same way I regard in-game ads that don't default to muted. More often than not, I'm in a public place when I'm scrolling (or gaming) on my phone, and I don't like disturbing those around me with sudden, unexpected blasts of noise, especially in the restroom.

Also, for the record (and PLEASE pass this along to others in charge of such things), I consider videos/ads that cannot actually be muted as a hate crime.

So, when I notice a video is playing, muted, I have to do two things if its some content I want to see - I have to unmute AND rewind. I see this so often on news sites where I am more often than not visiting specifically to see the video.

If its just some design element, then it is entirely a distraction from actually reading the content. Especially if its playing behind the content in some way to make the content difficult to read.

if something on a page moves without me initiating it, then I'm highly likely to just close that window and never come back. I will probably never think highly of that organisation again.

Anyone not respecting a user's "prefers-reduced-motion" preferences when present these days is making a deliberate choice.