Before I apologize, for those that don't remember life before Myspace, a little history...
Since the very beginnings of the Internet, online porn has been as big as it is right now, if not even more so, but keeping your personal things personal was much much harder. Even in 1996, one in five Americans had access to the internet. However, one family might have a single computer, or the only computer available was at your work or school. Regardless of your browser choice (Netscape, Internet Explorer or Opera), these browsers didn't have tabs or incognito modes. Every website was loaded in its own window. It was in this time frame that I started my professional career in the Wild-West Internet by learning how to use sex on line to make money.
It starts with a click on a salacious banner ad, and next thing you know a new browser window pops up underneath your main browser window with a naughty website. When you click the close button, two more pop out of nowhere showing even raunchier stuff. Every time you close a window it spawns more porno. To make matters worse, every site fills your history, cache and cookies with naughty media that chokes your machine and causes emotional damage next time grandma uses the PC to check her email.
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In 1997, I was a film school graduate with a degree in 3D animation and I was waiting tables at night (turns out, there weren't a ton of computer animator jobs back then). One night, a patron I was serving was celebrating a work victory, and we ended up talking about bit-rates and image file compression, and websites in general. I told him about the four whole sites I previously built. He was impressed I had my Photoshop certification from Vancouver Film School. He offered me a job, and asked me quietly, "You don’t have a problem with gentlemen’s magazines, right?"
Esquire? GQ? OMNI? I was a big fan of gentlemen’s magazines.
I quit my waiting job and arrived the next day at a building in the warehouse district of town. A generic non-porn-website that sold classified ads for car brokers and travel agencies and such was the official business (also the funnel for the bank account and credit cards). The business was pretty sketchy, finding every legal loophole to do what they could to make a buck, including black hat javascript and SEO techniques, but along the way also pioneering Internet technology such as video streaming, live chat and streaming video, and most importantly, processing online payments.
We weren't the best in the business, but we were big enough for better funded companies to pay attention to us. Because we didn't have a huge staff, we made up for it by playing tricks on visitors. We slowed down loading a picture right before it got to the good stuff so we could load another advertisement. We played psychological games with perl, javascript and html available to tweak our visitors enough to give us their money.
One day a fellow coder found a javascript that opened a new browser window when you close your original browser window. Then I found you could chain the functions together, so you could open as many windows as you wanted - all of them spawning their own browser windows. No matter how fast your mouse clicker is you could never close all the windows!
We wondered if this would anger enough people to hurt us, but we found as the days went on that it actually worked! Yes, it was awful and mean, but for some reason, people actually clicked the ads! We were getting a lot more notice.
In a few short weeks, the technique we created was being used on every porn site on the planet. This was the first time I ever had to choose whether or not to embrace a dark UI pattern - working against a user for the benefit of a company - but certainly not my last. (Not my last sketchy company, either. There was that one time my boss wanted me to take all of our clients’ records to my house because the police were about to seize the office as evidence of a meth operation, but I'll save that for another story.)
