[justin101]

There are a number of reasons this could be that are not necessarily nefarious. It's odd to jump straight to "something evil is going on"

Tell me this, does Twitter have some kind of "play nice" code that slows down inbound clicks through to a site so it doesn't DDOS other sites? I can easily imagine a scenario where anti DDOS caode would allow small sites to pass through quickly, yet sites under heavy "click through" load are being slightly throttled.

[pkulak]

Then click delays would appear random to any single client.

[Bootvis]

This wouldn’t reduce total requests made so it would be a weird anti-DDOS measure.

[berkes]

Indeed. A five seconds delay only means the DDOS starts five seconds later.