They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.

Ads and “scammy” tactics were always like bread and butter. The whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using whatever means possible except for what the industry deems unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there’s this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as tolerable (preferably under the guise of “improvement” to prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of opportunity is still open. Sad but true.

As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.

Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.

Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.

> if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it,

They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.

Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.

Instagram does that too, I never accidentally like any post when scrolling, but I accidentally like ads every day.

I noticed that too, it's so annoying.

The Tumblr app does this and it’s infuriating