Whatever your political affiliation, age or gender, there is one thing that has truly brought us together as a nation: our mutual hatred of Netflix’s auto-playing previews on its homepage.

It’s been a common complaint since the feature was rolled out in 2016. The original goal of this function was to cut down on our browsing time by providing more information about the viewing choices we were making. Netflix wanted to reduce our endless scrolling. But as it turns out, we are quite happy making our own decisions at a leisurely pace.

Auto-off

Subscribers were forced to dart around the Netflix app so as not to settle on a movie or TV show for too long and trigger a trailer to play. But on Thursday, the popular streaming service announced it’s finally addressing the issue of auto-play by giving users the ability to turn off previews.

See also

You will have to manually select this feature, though. Apparently “some people” actually enjoy the previews, so Netflix is leaving it on as the default setting. (Who are these people?) You can opt-out by going to manage profiles, clicking on your profile, and unchecking “autoplay previews while browsing on all devices.” 

If you also loathe the auto-play of the next episode feature, which doesn’t allow you to view the credits at the end of a show, you can also change this in the same menu.

Scrollers unite! Let the procrastination begin.

•February 6, 2020