It seems kind of a cheat to increase session length by making your page so hard to use that people will spend extra time just trying to figure out the controls.
Ad-tech and similarly myopic business pressures are frequently at odds with usability, and those business pressures ultimately determine what solution makes it to (or remains in) production. Less usable websites and tools are frequently "better performing" when measured by a metric leadership is beholden to, and usability is easily sacrificed if faith in its value doesn't extend to the very top of a company.
I know this is HN and it's fun to pick on incompetent designers, but there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security that frequently tops the news on here. Poor usability often reflects company values, not designer capability.
Yes, I meant that priorities and metrics changed, not that they intentionally sabotaged one metric in order to "cheat," and directly boost another metric, it just wasn't a priority anymore to optimize for usability. In fact, when you look at it from a market/systems level instead of any individual product or company, it doesn't even need to be one designer or product or company moving A-to-B from "usable" to "moar white space." It could be a totally different company who never optimized for usability who comes in and steals lunch.
>there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security
