Man who created 'most hated thing on the internet' issued apology to all users

Up there with autoplay videos, the hated Apple Intelligence, and Microsoft Office’s Clippy the Paperclip, there are some annoying things in the world of tech.

A 2004 MIT study even decreed that cell phones were the most annoying thing ever created.

Still, all of these pale in comparison to the pop-up ad.

There have been plenty of people who've apologized for their inventions, and like coffee pod inventor John Sylvan has apologized for them due to their environmental impact, the inventor of the pop-up ad admits he also made a mistake with his invention.

While it's hard to imagine our lives without the internet now, we'd love to imagine it without pop-ups. First originating on the Tripod.com webpage hosting site in the late '90s, pop-up inventor Ethan Zuckerman used JavaScript to allow a web page to open another window.

His intentions were originally noble, with Zuckerman saying he invented the pop-up in response to complaints from advertisers that their ads were appearing on pages associated with sexual content.

While standard ads are relatively easy to ignore, pop-ups force internet users to acknowledge them.

Tripiod.com started as a site that marketed content to graduates, but later, switched up its business model to become a webpage-hosting provider and 'proto-social network'.

Revenue streams were trialed, but when the likes of selling merchandise didn't catch on, advertising was there Tripod.com made its money.

Writing for The Atlantic in an article titled "The Internet's Original Sin", Zuckerman explains: "All of us have screwed up situations in our lives so badly that we’ve been forced to explain our actions by reminding everyone of our good intentions.

“It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble."

Expanding on the birth of the pop-up, he continued: "At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them.

“Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad."

Speaking of these good intentions, Zuckerman said that he wanted to build a tool where people could express themselves. He notes that in 1995, there weren't many ways to offer people free webpage hosting and make money at the same time.

The 52-year-old apolgizes further, seeing the state of the internet as a whole thanks to an over-reliance on advertising: "The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services."

Suggesting that we should start paying for privacy online back in 2014, Zuckerman concluded: "20 years into the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive."

We can't help but think of the crippling regret Cillian Murphy's J. Robert Oppenheimer has in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer after creating the atomic bomb (the real Oppenheimer apparently didn't show such remorse), but then again, pop-up ads haven’t killed hundreds of thousands of people. They've just killed our souls instead.