I cannot put into words how profoundly stupid this “feature” is. AOL and Geocities pages were genuinely more user friendly. Whoever added it, refreshed the page and said “yeah, this works well” and left it in should be fired! …out of a cannon and into the Sun!
I would assume that this would also reduce load on the lemmy servers.
It should, since the clients wouldn’t have to constantly ping and fetch new posts from the server, but only do so on demand.