I agree with @mrs.steemit : It's all about the format.
I like the short videos. 4-10min max, to take into account that people don't actually spend time on steemit, but browse the site at their lunchbreak, multitasking at the same time on their email or Facebook...
Auto-play could help but will probably not solve the issue. In the end, I believe that the VIDEO format is not 100% adapted to steemit. (imho).
You have other alternatives: I like what @mrs.steemit did with her yoga posts: using GIFS instead of videos.
It was easy to watch and had this kind of autoplay-shortclip taste.
I know well user @bentouch and I can say that is currently working on a post based on his work with the French TV. It's about MUSIC and how dance-hits remix some cool parts of the old disco tunes. (and it's f^*&ing awesome)
He showed me some drafts and I think he has a great answer to the "video-issue" we have on steemit:
He created soundcloud clips and put animated .gif images.
The results is very interesting because it allows a user to read the post in a very easy way: fast enough to multitask and do something else a the same time (what we all often do). The GIFs give you the visual cues you need to understand the process of sampling music to make electronic hits, and the sound cloud clips are short enough to be listened without staying 10min on the post.
TL;DR conclusion:
In our multitasking ADHD world, people will difficultly spend more than 3 minutes on a post with full dedicated attention. The perfect post should take that into account. Many solutions exist, like using GIFs, doing some autoplay. One other solution is to structure the post so that users can listen/read a part and then come back to it. Structure is KEY.
From a "feature" point of view, I believe that curation rewards should be limited when upvoting from the feed-thumbnail view. Basically: Feed-view upvote takes 100% voting power but only yields 50% revenue. Something like that. It will not solve the video issue, but could allow people to dig into posts.
Good idea. Next best thing to removing the voting buttons from the feed entirely, I guess.
Badass solution. I like it.
But ihmo Steemit needs a "7 figures" amount of users to do so without harming the platform.
That wouldn't solve much of the bot voting issues at all though. They use the cli_client most of the time to vote anyway, so I doubt that extra step makes it any harder for them.
But for the rest of the users, yes it might give them another incentive to read the content before voting, but then again it might just annoy them an extra step. :P
Btw
Here's the post I mentioned earlier:
https://steemit.com/music/@bentouch/5lybcz-music-theory-1-prodigy-or-piracy-a-punk-s-question
New author and great post!!
Let's give him a warm welcome.