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by stingraycharles 2070 days ago
One has to wonder whether they intentionally obfuscate this list. It sounds like they “trained” a browser, and captured the resulting state. I’m sure you can argue this makes things more fair (we trained it using real world behavior!), but I really can’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
2 comments
kaszanka 2070 days ago
It's generated by a Python script [0] from a list of URLs, but the input list doesn't seem to be included in the Chromium source (only the binary output of this tool).

[0] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/615d5eed47c10d8890...

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lima 2070 days ago
> The pre-seeded site list is generated based on the global percentage of site visitors who train Chrome to allow autoplay for that site; a site will be included on the list if a sizable majority of site visitors permit autoplay on it. The list is algorithmically generated, rather than manually curated, and with no minimum traffic requirement. With the implementation of the autoplay policy for Web Audio in M71, Web Audio playback is also included in calculating the MEI score for a given site.

https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay/autoplay-pre-s...

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stingraycharles 2070 days ago
Will this not have some kind of self-reinforcing behavior, as the measurements are biased towards sites that are currently unmuted by default?

According to the MEI it actively measures user behavior and one of the most important measures is that a video is unmuted. From the document:

“The MEI is meant to allow media heavy websites (e.g. YouTube, Netflix) that rely on autoplay for their core experience. It is a non-goal to allow websites with a “good media behaviour” to autoplay without restrictions”

It doesn’t sound too good, and still doesn’t really explain how everything is seeded.

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