I was minding my own business, reading quietly. It was a Montreal Gazette article about a dynamic market for street parking. I had listened to a Freakonomics podcast about this in San Francisco and was interested to see the Montreal angle.
I made the mistake maintaining interest in the article and reading well into the middle of the piece. That’s when I was blasted by the loud electric guitar sounds of a car commercial embedded in the article.
Autoplay videos are a very bad idea for online newspapers. It turns out, everyone else feels the same way. Here’s a PC World article showing how to change browser settings to stop it.