Twitter’s been testing some, uh, questionable design tweaks to its platform all through 2021, however its newest may be the worst but. On Wednesday, firm Revenue Product Lead Bruce Falck introduced that Twitter can be testing out a brand new advert format that places promoted tweets… into your conversations. The fortunate Android and iOS customers which can be part of this world check will now see adverts in both the primary, third, or eighth reply underneath a given tweet.

“We’re excited about trying this out for our advertisers and we’re eager to explore how it could open the door for additional opportunities to reward Tweet authors and creators,” Falck wrote. “We see a big opportunity to build an ad offering that creates value and aligns incentives for creators and advertisers.”

Listen, as a Twitter person myself, I’ve at all times been on board with a few of its just lately added options—like Tip Jars and Super Followers—which can be designed to “reward” the platform’s energy customers for his or her content material. But in contrast to both of these instruments, Twitter adverts aren’t a button you may paste to your profile. They’re adverts. They’re annoying, intrusive, and typically deeply weird, which isn’t the kind of content material you’d need to shove within the heart of the kinds of toxic convos that crop up on plenty of Tweeter’s timelines. Popping adverts between individuals’s conversations feels just like the final gasp of a platform that already know’s it’s shoved as many adverts because it presumably may into every other nook and cranny of your feed and is determined for some new strategy to squeeze revenue from its customers.

And it’s not onerous to see why. When it involves advert income, Twitter’s at all times been enjoying catch-up to different main platforms within the social media house. Last quarter, for instance, the platform reported an impressive $1.05 billion in advert income—and whereas $1 billion is nothing to sneeze at, Facebook earned $10.4 billion in advert income that very same quarter, whereas Amazon earned close to $8 billion. In different phrases, Twitter’s going through some, uh, fairly steep competitors in an area the place whichever platform will get probably the most eyeballs on its adverts, wins.

It additionally wants advertisers that need to attain these eyeballs within the first place. Because Twitter’s gained a popularity of being a haven for hate speech, harassment, and, nicely, lots and lots of porn, entrepreneurs have traditionally felt kinda icked-out on the prospect of getting their product proven alongside individuals’s feeds. And whereas Twitter has made some strikes this yr to assuage their issues—extra partnerships! extra metrics! extra audits!—the actual fact is, any Twitter person will let you know the platform nonetheless has a great deal of hate speech, harassment, and porn.

And, once more, as a Twitter person, I can affirm that a number of the worst components of the platform aren’t occurring inside individuals’s dangerous posts, however contained in the dialog beneath these tweets. Hell, Twitter’s even making an attempt out a system to let users know after they may be strolling into a very messy dialog! It’s unclear whether or not Twitter’s making an attempt to squeeze adverts into its extra “heated” convos—however contemplating how rapidly the platform lets individuals devolve into absolute dickwads from one reply to the subsequent, it appears unavoidable. And when that occurs, hoards of advertisers are going to affix the hoards of customers which can be screaming about how terrible this “test” goes to be. If the corporate gained’t take heed to us, then I hope it listens to them.