Recently, I saw some news page where there was a video, but it was just stringing together the sentences from the article on top of a random stock image.
I was extremely confused why this exists, but then realized, I hadn’t unmuted the video. Surely, it reads it out for sight impaired folks.
…nope, there was no audio. They just figured, they should have a worse way of reading. And of course, it would float on top of the article, too, to make reading that worse as well.
That reminded me a bit about some odd behavior that have some form of vertical videos like shorts/reels (don’t remember where I saw it) like you are watching a video and then it moves up a bit like to show you (like if you didn’t know) that you can doom scroll forcing you to tap the video to bring it at its original place, this has happened to me several times like, bruh, what the heck is this asshole design.
Google got in trouble recently for running ads on these videos. Advertisers would pay for a YouTube ad and it would only run on these random videos in the corner of the screen on click bait websites.
Simple mode in chrome, reading mode (not sure if that’s an extension actually) in firefox. Whatever addon you need to just show the text without the ads. Works on most sites
And “news” sites that intentionally delay the relevant images/videos to load after their ads and related stories, so users scrolling around for the only relevant content in the entire “article” see all the ads first.
I like it on certain sites like YouTube where I can read the comments while watching the video if I want to, but for the majority of sites and especially if the video’s an ad/not the main focus of the page the website can fuck right off.
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