Video that scrolls with content: go home, you're drunk

The BBQ Pit
1

In the last few weeks I’ve noticed what seems to be a new attempt to make the web less useful to the end user (probably it’s been around for years, but maybe not).

I don’t watch video online (usually). I’m here for the articles. But now, it seems, that when I scroll past the lead video to the actual article, websites are now popping-out the video and playing it automatically in the corner of the page the instant I scroll beyond the video.

Here’s an example from the Huffington Post.

Here’s a hint. If I scroll down to read an article below a video, odds are I want to read the article, not be chased by content I don’t want to watch in the first place.

Ugh. Who thought this was a good idea? Who is this serving? Whose web experience is improved by disabling the ability to scroll past content, instead requiring a mouse click?

2

The other day I opened an article, read it for about five seconds and it instantly jumped to the bottom of the comments.

I scrolled back up to the top to continue reading and it did it twice more. I gave up and closed the tab.

Congratulations morons, your coding rendered the article unreadable.

3

The web is a barren rocky place where my seed can find no purchase.

4

I keep googling for a way to disable that feature from hell, but the best I got is disable videos entirely.

5

This drives me nuts, too. Especially when the video starts playing, I pause or x it because I just want to read the article and scroll down to read only to have the video follow me. Because obviously when I stopped or x’d the video, I didn’t really mean it.

6

It’s even worse when you are tying to read them at work. The video is blocked by our Security and I get a big scary-looking warning.

7

It seems like a lot of websites are doing that now. It wasn’t so bad, but recently they’ve taken the aggravation level up still further–many times the auto-playing video doesn’t even pertain to the subject of the article!

8

I’ve complained about this before. It’s dumb. What bugs me even more is that they still drag that video down when you explicitly stop it before scrolling down. I’ve paused the video–I clearly am not interested in watching it at this moment. It’s especially bad when there’s no column over on the right, so it actually covers up content as I scroll.

I can only think these are designed to try and keep the article readers on the site longer. Because, despite all this, we do usually wind up stopping it and then reading the article. I presume they show at least a bit of an ad, so that counts towards revenue.

9

What’s also fun is if you decide you actually want to watch/listen to a video during your web-surfing session, and find out that several unwanted/dopey popup videos are playing simultaneously in the background.