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Gregory

How I imagine the user story for every large social media platform adding autoplaying videos that often can't be disabled: as an Instagram user, I want videos in my feed to start playing automatically but muted so that I always miss the first several seconds of audio should I want to hear it.

2 comments
Gregory

Instagram in particular is the worst offender:
- Stories on the web are always muted. Always. And there's no seeking so you can't easily restart the video after unmuting it.
- On the contrary, in the Android app, if you unmute one video in your feed, you're actually setting a global "sound is unmuted" flag, so that when you encounter another video 10 posts later, you get startled by it autoplaying with sound.
- In the app, if you have the RINGER set to silent, stories are muted. WHY TF.

iliazeus

@grishka autoplaying anything sounds more like "user engagement metrics"-driven feature that a user story-driven one. Like, nobody wanted it, but some studies probably showed that people spend more time in the app when it has moving pictures, or something.

In a similar vein, I don't think anyone ever wanted to have stories in non-social-media apps! But like every second bank app I've seen has those for some reason.

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