User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/The Success and Future of Modernization/@comment-24687156-20180126161204/@comment-20644-20180128180322

If you are seeing auto-sound Featured Videos, please send that as a bug report to Special:Contact/bug. To my knowledge we are not aware of any such reports from other users.

In regards to communities being involved, we are building a Community Video Program where admins can review scripts and users can even write their own scripts that we will produce into Featured Videos. You can volunteer you and your community for that at Special:Contact.

In regards to the video's placement (as well as autoplay), we tested a number of possibilities a year ago and this is the placement that received the most engagement from visitors. Additionally, an "above the fold" placement (meaning, visible before the first scroll) and autoplay video is the only placement that meets the threshold of what advertisers call "viewability," a key metric in today's ad world.

If videos were at the bottom of the page, or lower in general, and did not autoplay then the preroll ads in front of them would be of significantly lower value and we would have to re-introduce some of the lower-performing ads on the page. As a result, page performance would suffer.