- Joined
- Mar 31, 2026
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Ethan Zuckerman was working at Tripod in the 90s when a big car company complained that their banner ad was showing up next to some... questionable content.
So he came up with a solution: make the ad open in a separate window instead of putting it directly on the page.
Which, in theory, probably sounded pretty reasonable at the time.
Then the internet happened.
Suddenly everyone had pop-ups attacking them from every direction just for trying to read a webpage.
Years later, Zuckerman looked back at it and basically admitted that the whole ad-supported internet ended up going in a pretty bad direction. Instead of trying to make ads smarter and track people better, he thinks websites should give people the option to simply pay for the services they actually want.
Honestly, there's something pretty funny about the person responsible for one of the internet's most hated inventions eventually coming back and saying, Yeah... we probably shouldn't have done that.
