At long last, you can now dis­able Netflix’s auto­play feature

It’s the worst part of Net­flix, after the vague sen­sa­tion that the­atri­cal releas­ing may be on the way out: you’re scrolling through the con­tent library, and when­ev­er you leave the cur­sor over one title for more than three sec­onds, your speak­ers start blar­ing an auto­play trail­er or the pro­gram itself.

It’s noisy, it’s busy, and the effi­ca­cy of hook­ing some­one by yelling the first few sec­onds of a movie at them is, to put it gen­tly, questionable.

Net­flix is not deaf to the people’s cries. The stream­ing giant has announced the addi­tion of a new func­tion­al­i­ty allow­ing users to turn off the auto­play fea­ture. Just like that, jus­tice is served.

It came as some­thing of a sur­prise, how­ev­er, and not just because the gen­er­al pub­lic has been beg­ging for a respite from the tyran­ny of auto­play since the feature’s intro­duc­tion. The recent rev­e­la­tion that Net­flix counts any­thing over two min­utes as a ​“view” sug­gest­ed that the auto­play fea­ture may con­tribute some chunk of the company’s met­rics, from peo­ple fix­ing a snack or using the lava­to­ry while leav­ing the app open.

While the inner work­ings of Net­flix remain a jeal­ous­ly guard­ed secret, this devel­op­ment sig­ni­fies one of two things. It could be that they’re rejig­ger­ing what counts as a ​“watch,” or that they’re suf­fi­cient­ly secure to take what­ev­er that hit might be. In either case, it’s a show of con­fi­dence, and one that makes the user expe­ri­ence that much better.

Most intrigu­ing of all is the idea that Net­flix can be respon­sive to requests aired en masse from their sub­scriber base. Next up, let us all unite as one voice so that we may put an end to the trun­cat­ing of end cred­its by the next episode. Or at least, we can get anoth­er sea­son of The OA.