What's Up With These Little Square Boxes?

Okay, what is up with these square box arrows at the end of nearly every single link on Steemit?

When I first saw them I thought they might have finally figured out how to get a new tab to open when you click a link. The little warning that pops up on the box say:

"This link will take you away from Steemit.com."

So I figured, like most other sites, when you click a link that will take you to another site it would open up a new tab. This makes sense. You don't want people to actually leave your site because they may not come back as fast. So open another tab with the new site and leaving the old one open at least gives a chance that the user will return when they see the tab - especially for a social media site.

"That is awesome," I thought. "Now I wont have to use two hands to press 'ctrl + click' to watch another DTube video. It will open another tab automatically."

The reason I do this is because when you do leave steemit.com on an link and then press the back button twice to get back to the feed you were on, you get to start at the top again? What if there are only 3 new posts but you were down 50 posts? You have to scroll all the way down to find where you left off, so opening a new tab is much easier.

Turns out that's not the case. Nothing has actually changed. There is just a bunch of little square boxes at the end of every link and every picture that is a link.

What is the purpose of this?

Even the links that actually link back to Steemit.com have these little boxes.

Is this a weird, useless update, or am I missing something?