Auto-play videos are becoming the scourge of news websites

For some reason, Broadway actors pass out and do the chicken dance in an auto-play video on nytimes.com.

It started innocently enough. Maybe six months ago, the New York Times website started featuring black and white videos in The Interview, part of the outlet’s Weekend Reads section. As you scrolled down nytimes.com you’d be presented with a famous person either goofing for the camera or doing their best to appear profound. It was slightly annoying and distracting — and sometimes creepy, when someone stared at you intently from your computer screen — but it was gone with another flick of the finger.

Now, a few months later, it’s gotten out of control. A couple of days ago nytimes.com featured at least seven stories that included auto-play videos, including two right next to each other and two on top of each other. It’s incredibly distracting, the flickering mini-screens making it almost impossible to read adjacent headlines. Some of the embedded videos play as soon as your screen reaches them, others pause a few seconds and then start. I scrolled and scrolled, hoping to reach a static page. I finally did — in the food section. Nope, wait, a video started there, too, a slideshow of stills and videos of kitchens from different eras. Some of the images are full Technicolor, some are black and white. Some, apparently from the 40s and 50s, are somewhere in between. They flicker with the incoherent rapidity of a poorly-made TikTok video. All to draw attention to a story called “Why Your Kitchen Looks Like That.” Heady stuff.

Today’s nytimes.com homepage features one of the worst examples yet, a montage of black-and-white videos of cityscapes across which grey, yellow and black geographic shapes constantly shift. It’s pure chaos. The headline is, “Is America Ready To Build Again?” I don’t know, and thanks to the autoplay video, I don’t care to the learn the New York Time’s answer.

There’s a line between drawing attention and repelling it. The New York Times has found it.

The New York Times is the worst offender, but not the only one. A few months ago the Los Angeles Times — which reliable sources insist remains a newspaper — added a “LA Times Media Group Streaming” feature to the top of its website. Now, rather than the top two headlines of the day, the first thing you see is a streaming video that’s completely bereft of context. No explanation line, just a random video of people talking, a drone zooming somewhere or someone doing something somewhere. This morning it was a grey haired man wearing headphones and gesticulating, presumably discussing something in which readers are expected to be interested. I am not.

Which is the irony of the invasion of the auto-play news video. I’m sure I’m not alone in that the videos make it far less likely that I will click on a story, even if I may otherwise have been inclined to. I’m too busy scrolling past them as fast as I can. They’re not just annoying, they’re self-defeating.

It’s anyone’s guess what he’s talking about.

Fortunately, the staid Wall Street Journal hasn’t succumbed to the trend. Likewise, and surprisingly, the Washington Post, now owned by tech gazillionaire Jeff Bezos, has made only limited forays. Smaller outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the Seattle Times limit their multimedia assault to slideshows of pictures next to one or two featured stories. They’re annoying, but nothing like the full visual assault the New York Times has launched.

Also somewhat surprisingly, the websites of major cable news networks haven’t totally adopted this obnoxious trend, though cnn.com is getting pretty bad. I just checked, and at the top right of the page there’s an autoplay video of Adam Sandler talking with Ariana Grande, because why not? It’s doubly annoying because it’s more like a gif, a five second preview that loops in the corner of your eye while you’re trying to read adjacent headlines. Also, the placement is unfortunate, Sandler being his goofball self directly next to a headline, “Boat sunk in ‘double-tap’ strike wasn’t headed toward U.S.” Nothing says “hard hitting news outlet” like featuring Billy Madison next to a flaming boat wreck in which half a dozen drug smugglers were just blown up.

Scroll down a bit and there’s an autoplay of someone using a saber to uncork a champagne bottle, with the headline “The easy trick to sabering a champagne bottle without looking ridiculous.” Of course, the easiest way to not look ridiculous sabering a champagne bottle is to not saber a champagne bottle. But I digress.

Sometimes the videos aren’t just distracting, they’re downright creepy. A bit further down cnn.com is an autoplay video of a pen full of robot dogs walking around to which an — oh, let’s call him or her an “artist” — has affixed hyper realistic heads of tech oligarchs including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Which leads me to reiterate the subheadline from a post a couple of weeks ago: Capitalism has run out of things to do.

This autoplay video will haunt my dreams.

It’s bad enough on computer screens. On mobile devices, videos frequently appear on pop-ups that devour the entire screen and are so poorly oriented that it’s impossible to find the “X” to close them. Yesterday I innocently clicked a link from realclearpolitics.com on my iPhone and ended up at a page from the Washington Examiner that was entirely blocked by a video advertisement for Buffalo Wild Wings.

This is how media and other sites are behaving today, in the soon-to-be archaic world of screens. It’s all too easy to envision a near future in which billions of human beings wearing “smart” eyewear are bombarded constantly with various pop-up ads and videos superimposed directly on the outside world. The YouTube-ization of reality is neigh, and it is horrifying to contemplate.

For now, auto-videos are a minor annoyance. But we normal people aren’t powerless. We can simply not click on them. For all their seeming omnipotence, tech companies are extremely vulnerable to human behavior. Witness the increasing pushback against the likes of Waymo, a company that decided to use neighborhoods as laboratories and human beings as guinea pigs. Of course, we’re all tech’s fodder to some extent. But the pushback against the auto-taxi company shows that when companies cross certain lines, humans can push them back into line.

As innocuous as auto-play videos are, they’re harbingers of things to come. Let’s hope enough people react negatively that companies kill this trend in the crib.