I shouldn't get too deep into this because smarter people have written more about it, but...

Just imagine someone coming to your profile on a public computer. Library, school, work.

That's ignoring things like loads, data use, distraction, disruption, and all the technical stuff.

I dont really mind autoplay but atleast we can still manually play it seems.

I def welcome this change, I've been guilty of putting auto_play players myself, but more often I've been to a lot of pages/threads where I would have to listen to a loud song blare out, and the most annoying part is that they hide the players, making me have to either mute the tab, or have another tab play to override it.

Autoplay isn't a good practice. And it was even worse when browsers didn't allow you to mute tabs. That forced you to mute entire browser or (more commonly) mute the speakers.

Note: we've become aware an issue where the 'View Full Site' link is not responding to taps on the mobile layout - we're looking into it.

Update: this appears to be resolved now - try refreshing your browser if you're still seeing it.

Note: No special release notes for the next release (Tuesday), so no new Technical Update post today.

If autoplay were some kind of setting per page you could click that was off by default or would only autoplay when the user visited their own user page, I wouldn't mind it. However, people who want autoplay have the assumption that everyone thinks their autoplay stuff is great which is obviously never true.

I'm glad because I had this issue when I first tried confirming this account's email along with my bot account that still doesn't have an email due to the issue

As someone who doesn't abuse autoplay and plays more mellow music so I don't blare people's eardrums off, I'm a little disappointed.

But I understand it was abused a lot, and I myself have witnessed users trolling other users with hidden autoplaying widgets with ear-rape which I have had to look into the page's source code to track down and edit out (and subsequently warned and temp editblocked the user in question).

So I welcome the change, but I'm also conflicted. Oh well.