Starting to play sound without user confirmation is a default tab-close. I wont even take the time to look at it. Bonus point for not being flash that hijacks the browser shortcut.
The sound is not particularly intrusive or loud, and you clicked on a link that said "Listen" in the title.
Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.
As others I had a totally different expectation given the title. I thought it would be a piece about how Wikipedia had some message or lesson that we should listen to. I think the author had no bad intentions and what he build is probably worth looking at. I was just pointing out how a mistake in web design made me completely ignore this website because I felt it violated my control over my computer.
In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.
> In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.
Solving it in the community can solve the problem of people unwittingly stumbling upon it from here, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem, which is that autoplay is rude. (Surely we've all had the experience of not being able to find the tab from the huge group we just opened that's playing the sound.) It's good if sites see that they get fewer visitors with autoplay than without.
It really should be a browser level setting where you whitelist the sites that are allowed to do it. I don't mind when Youtube does it, but most sites annoy me.
While I agree with the sentiment, in this case all I can say is: You're missing out. I enjoyed the relaxing, ambient-ish sounds combined with tempting links to Wikipedia articles.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to auto-playing. People are fine with it on well-known sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, etc. And most people, when they unwittingly click on a YouTube link, blame the person who made the link, not the site itself. Bizarrely, the target of ire shifts to the site if it's not popular enough.
I just went clicking randomly on Vimeo links and I didn't find a single auto-playing video.
You are right about YouTube and I actually think they should handle visitors that come from outside YouTube differently than visitors from inside the site. In the first case auto-play is annoying in the second it is what is wanted.
It would be good to have a "click to unmute" option as the default for how a browser handles audio. Click to play works well for Flash plugins, it might be good for audio as well.
I wish for a time disabled extension. Basically turning the browser into an html/css based image renderer. No more animated ads, autoplay audio/video. Heaven.
I'm sure you're joking, but here's a blast from the past (I'd forgotten about it, anyway): you can set `image.animation_mode` to `none` in Firefox for that.
I wasn't even joking, I'd really love to try purely static (beside the old guard <a> <form> elements) webpages and am delighted there's such an option, this is amazing, thanks.
When I come to HN, I usually read all topics on the front page, then open interesting ones in tabs. After opening 10 tabs, I hear music, then I find the culprit, close the tab, do not look back.
Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.