Welcome to the slightly obnoxious future.

Autoplay video is going to find you. Chances are it already has, unless you live a cloistered existence and manage to avoid Facebook or Twitter or any number of media websites.

When you scroll through Twitter, videos and GIFs will automatically start blaring from your computer, Twitter's announced this week that it had introduced video and GIF autoplay to its service follows on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat (in its Discover section) and various media sites that have begun rolling clips whether or not users want to see them.

See also: Twitter timelines get noisier as videos and GIFs start autoplaying

Twitter insisted that the change as good for consumers — "See more, tap less" — a notion that many users didn't quite believe.

@StevenBrust @twitter You know why they're doing this: it's about giving advertisers access to our attention, not a "feature" for us. — Chris McLaren (@MisterMcLaren) June 16, 2015

Debra Williamson, a principal analyst for eMarketer, said that the embrace of autoplay is part of the larger arms race across the web around video and the lucrative advertising it attracts.

The social properties are really coming on strong. Facebook is a huge challenger to YouTube and Twitter wants in on that too. Snapchat and Instagram are also putting out different types of video advertising," Williamson said. "They all want to see video get bigger, and they all want their share of it."

What's that sound?

Thankfully, not all autoplay is created equal.

Facebook and Twitter can at least claim that their videos don't play with sound and can quickly be stopped as a user keeps scrolling. Both require users to click the video to enable sound.

Other sites — and their advertising — can't quite claim the same. Autoplay on media websites often includes sound, leaving people susceptible to unexpected blasts of sound coming from their speakers. Accidentally-running-into-autoplay has become the new leaving-your-phone-on-your-desk-with-the-ringer-on, the kind of careless aural disaster sure to alienate your colleagues in open-plan offices.

User annoyance of autoplay is evident. Google even came out with the ability to figure out which tab is producing sound, a problem often caused when a page suddenly starts playing video.

Sheesh. @twitter's new auto-play for videos uses WiFi AND mobile data, by default. Turn off in settings pic.twitter.com/ySxzIg9Zt6 — Katie Boehret (@KatieBoehret) June 20, 2015

What's the point of suddenly blasting a video at you? Well, this chart sums it up nicely: Money.

Fight back

Autoplay has been around for years on the Internet, and people are getting tired of it.

A Reddit discussion entitled "Dear websites that set their videos to autoplay: Please stop. Seriously. If I want to watch the video I'll click the play button." features gems like this:

That post is actually a year old, and autoplay video on the Internet is a topic that has been the source of no shortage of complaints. "Autoplay is a bad idea not just for accessibility but for usability and general sanity while browsing," blogged web developer Emma Sax back in 2009.

Others have made more recent complaints.

If you don't want loud advertising videos popping up on you phone drawing angry looks from neighbors, don't browse @wired — Rob Graham (@ErrataRob) June 19, 2015

But, like any bad but profitable idea, autoplay has slowly made its way across the Internet, spurred on by people watching a ton of videos on smartphones.

The upside is that people have started to fight back. Most web browsers have simple ways to prevent programs from operating without at least a click. Chrome in particular has apps that specifically target autoplay on YouTube.

Facebook and Twitter also allow you to turn off their in-stream autoplay.

Autoplay != autopay

Autoplay has already shown to be an easy way to boost video views, but advertisers aren't entirely convinced that this is a good thing.

Hard questions plague autoplay video metrics — is 3 seconds really long enough to be considered a view? — and they're the same problems companies have to solve before autoplay becomes effective in advertising hot cars, clever teeth-whitening ads and

"There's still some question about autoplay quite honestly. I think not every advertiser believes that autoplay as an accurate indicator of engagement," Williamson said.

Still, it's hard to ignore the massive scale that autoplay has spurred. Facebook has yet to really try to monetize video using autoplay, but it has succeeded in using the format to begin rivaling YouTube in the span of about a year. Facebook now claims to provide around 4 billion video views a day.

Whether that number is legitimately comparable to the viewcounts of rivals also speaks to questions about whether advertisers are sold that autoplay is a good thing. Facebook counts a video as being viewed after only three seconds of airing. With videos autoplaying, it's conceivable that people scrolling through their Newsfeed

Jim Nail, an analyst for Forrester with a focus on online video, said nobody knows if autoplay is good.

Twitter, he added, had more or less been pressured into it.

"This is classic technology industry herd mentality," Nail said. "Once it’s launched by one technology company, then every company feels they need to launch it and offer it."

Nail said that online video needed considerably more research before best practices were clear. TV advertising, he noted, has gone through decades of study to optimize its advertising.

"People are just throwing things on the wall to see what sticks and what people will pay for as opposed to doing any research around what is really the best way to communicate a message and what’s really acceptable to consumers," Nail said.