system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
It’s probably an unintentional feature. Usually it’s because an ad is loading in, so you go to click something near the top of the page (like a toolbar) then boom, banner ad loads in and shifts everything down. I say “unintentional feature” because I’m sure they noticed it and decided not to fix it since websites often get ad revenue per click.
gpt
This! I just asked someone who’s a programmer in the family and they said it’s because the website is reaching out to different servers in real-time to load the various features on the site, and if one server is slower than the other or down at the time, it may shift things around once it actually loads compared to the other items on the page which results in things being slightly shifted on you when you happen to click (this is my poor paraphrase of what they just told me; they explained it more eloquently) I’ve often wondered about this too and it can be pretty frustrating at times.