If you haven’t experienced Facebook’s latest video update yet, you will soon. But for your sake I hope your experience is much more savoury than mine.

The new feature makes videos that have been uploaded to Facebook play automatically as you scroll over them. This is a feature that has clearly been inspired by Twitter’s app Vine.

Facebook’s idea is obvious: grab their users’ attention by making videos play automatically and possibly chuck in some sponsored video opportunities for business page owners once subscribers have gotten used to the change.

Problems with AutoPlay

Personally I hate them. From what I’ve experienced, I get lag on the app when scrolling through my feed on an iPhone because it’s downloading the video to autoplay, which I quickly glide past if possible.

What this is doing to my 3G bandwidth allowance, I have no idea. And the result is fairly similar when browsing through Wi-Fi.

What’s worse is that this new feature is forcing me to see things I really don’t want to see. For example, on one encounter I was browsing through my feed and wham! I was forced to watch the aftermath of a car accident where dead human bodies were scattered across a roadway.

Thank you Facebook!

Some people might say it’s not Facebook’s fault and it’s my friends that I need to sort out for posting that stuff in the first place but previously I could choose not to play any material like that.

Remember the little play button you could tap? Times were quieter back then. I would simply read a horrific headline, see that it’s not for me, and keep scrolling. Joy!

Now I feel like Zuckerberg has taken a leaf from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange:

Image from A Clockwork Orange © Warner Bros 1971.

What could be done?

So what’s my message to the largest social network? Sort it out! My concern is that if there is no filter then plenty of people will be put off using it to avoid being hit with content they really don’t want to see.

In addition to the unsavoury content, it has added a lot of noise to the already cluttered news feed so a less stressful user experience might be more preferable. Frustration may have kept Flappy Birds users going back for more but this is no game.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not one for extreme censorship and an autocratic attitude in the world of social but if they could kindly provide an off button for this feature so I could choose what I wanted to watch, I’d greatly appreciate it.

In fact, there’s a whole Facebook community who would also like the same: https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10202634558606616.

Tell us what you think about Facebook’s new video autoplay feature in the comments area below. Good idea or bad idea?

Credit: The image in this article is a remix of Cassandra Ng’s Emotions Photography project.