People Who Were Ruined By Their Greatest Creation

You come up with an idea nobody ever thought of before. Somehow, you manage to get it noticed by the right eyes, and it blows up into an entire phenomenon. Then you walk away with wads of money and retire to your own private island. That's how it works, right?

Some of the most famous — and ubiquitous — inventions ever ended up becoming maligned by none other than their own creators. Most live with regret, and some have had their reputations all but annihilated after coming up with things such as cubicles, hoverboards, and even the Internet. This isn't a case of malicious intent. Smartphone games that can pass the time on a subway or social media that allows you to network with people who might be on the other side of the planet aren't inherently evil. The problem is that they had some unexpected, unwanted side effects that forever changed the way they were seen.

If you never thought someone would regret breeding Labradoodles, putting Facebook online, or creating Crystal Pepsi (maybe that last one), you're about to be surprised.

Wait, how could such an adorable dog have been a massive mistake? The Labradoodle — a labrador-poodle mix — was the first "designer dog" that was never intended to be one. Breeder Wally Conron told ABC News Australia he bred this creature as a guide dog for someone allergic to dogs. Conron was a guide dog breeder used to breeding Labradors. He thought that a mashup between a lab and a poodle would end up in a canine companion that would be as competent a guide dog as a lab with a poodle's hypoallergenic coat.

There was an issue. Out of the three pups born in the first litter, only one wouldn't have its future owner reaching for tissues all the time. Though Conron tried to get the other two adopted, nobody wanted them, even people in need of a guide dog. Then something unexpected happened. More and more people wanted in on this breed.

Such a demand for Labradoodles spawned that breeders who were far from legit started merging poodles and labs so they could have bragging rights. Their easygoing temperament has made them more popular than Conron ever expected, according to the BBC. In an interview with ABC News Australia, he admitted that he had crossed into territory he shouldn't have. "I opened a Pandora's box and released a Frankenstein's monster," Conron said in regret. "When I'm out and I see these Labradoodles I can't help myself, I go over them in my mind."

From teen hangouts forever immortalized in movies like "Mallrats" to a scourge on suburbia, depending on how you see them, shopping malls have become a cultural icon. The problem is that their creator ended up feeling they should have never existed.

When architect Victor Gruen designed the first mall, the Austrian immigrant wasn't trying to contribute to suburban sprawl, but create a place that merged shopping and culture, according to Quartz. He also didn't imagine it as a hub of consumerism but a thriving complex where people could actually live. There would be stores, of course, but also schools, a hospital, and everything else to make such a community self-reliant. He opened his first mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. It was seen as revolutionary. There were fountains, art installations, and an aviary full of birds.

After malls kept devouring more and more land, Gruen realized his vision had created a monster. He watched as retailers only used the aspects of a mall that would generate the most profit, according to KCET LA. Malls became consumerist megaliths that would go on to multiply and make him regret what he started more and more. He saw that there was no effort made to turn malls into communities — and by the 1970s, America became overrun with them. Quartz says Gruen utterly despised suburban sprawl, but his nightmare came to life.

Remember Crystal Pepsi? Behind this caffeine-free soda was David Novak, who thought it was his best idea ever until it spilled all over. It just didn't taste enough like Pepsi.

In an essay he wrote himself on his own business website, Novak, the former head of marketing at Pepsi, explains what he learned from what he now considers his most egregious mistake. The bottlers tried voicing their concerns, and some taste testers reported an aftertaste, but nothing changed. He admits he thought he was too experienced a marketer to have to listen to anyone else. Instead, he decided to go with the backing from his own boss, positive responses from focus groups, and Dan Rather's mention of Crystal Pepsi on the CBS Evening News. He ended up launching it so fast that quality control was off. The sugary drink was alien to anyone who knew what Pepsi should taste like.

When Crystal Pepsi launched in 1992, there was a trend of "clear" and "pure" products ranging from soap to soda, as Business Insider remembers. This didn't necessarily mean there was any less sugar in this doomed version of Pepsi. There was just the illusion that it was somehow better for you. What Novak really regrets is not the invention itself, but coming up with it when he didn't have nearly as much experience as a business leader, and he believes he should have listened to his employees. It was resurrected for a limited run in 2016, however, because nostalgia.

The information superhighway has become plagued by misinformation. Never mind that it has also become infested with propaganda, private information that has been exposed, and even undercover operations. You might have been part of Facebook's secret 2012 psychological experiments without even knowing it, according to Vanity Fair. This is all the aftermath of a platform that was meant for nuclear scientists to share ideas but then grew tentacles and took on a life of its own.

Programmer Tim Berners-Lee morphed a defunct TV into his first computer. The prototype for what would eventually become the Internet was based on an existing system, something the government had been using to transmit classified messages since the '60s. Berners-Lee had no idea what he started when he released the code for the World Wide Web to the public. It didn't go viral immediately. There were other ways to zap information digitally, but when people started to realize the nearly endless potential of the Internet, it spread at warp speed. Suddenly, as The Guardian reports, social media boomed and the phenomenon of cyberbullying became a real concern. It is not so much the Internet itself but the way it evolved which bothered Berners-Lee.

"Given there are more webpages than there are neurons in your brain, it's a complicated thing," he told The Guardian in an interview where he expressed his regrets about what his brainchild had become.

Tech developer Chris Whetherell just wanted to make it easier for people to share a tweet they found interesting. Enter the retweet button. Unfortunately, this led to the mass spreading of misinformation (often used to battle the opposing side) that has become an online epidemic.

There was an era before you could retweet someone with just a click. Back then, retweeting involved typing "RT" and the Twitter handle of the person who originally tweeted whatever it was, according to BuzzFeed News. You also had to copy and paste the text they wrote as well as any links they may have shared. Wetherell came up with a magic button that would do all that instantly. What he didn't realize at the time was that retweeting manually required more thought — what was it you were actually putting out there, and what implications could that have? Facebook soon jumped on the insta-sharing trend with its "share" button.

Twitter soon became volatile. That escalated with Gamergate, during which women in the gaming industry were bombarded with offensive retweets. The 2016 election also saw a storm of retweeted rumors. Wetherell realized you could just hit "retweet" ad nauseam and even set up retweet attacks without really thinking whether you were spreading false or harmful information. PC Magazine reports that Twitter is now trying to reimagine the retweet button by possibly making it mandatory to type in a message before you hit that button.

Mark Zuckerburg may be the obvious poster child of Facebook, but former president Sean Parker has some heavy regrets about the social media platform where likes are everything, as he confessed to The Guardian. It seems borderline unbelievable for someone whose creation made him a billionaire.

"Likes" make users feel validated, the way Parker sees it. However, if you expect a post to accumulate hundreds of them and someone else's cat meme steals all the attention, you may end up feeling down. The dopamine boost was exactly why the "like" button was created in the first place. Zuckerberg, Parker, and the other founders of Facebook wanted it to absorb as much of your attention as possible, and part of that was constantly checking to see how many "likes," and therefore how much validation, you could get. This objective backfired. As he told Axios, he is now nervous about how it could affect focus and socialization.

Parker has gone so far as to speak out on his Facebook grievances publicly. At a 2017 Axios event, he recalled how he would convince everyone he possibly could to make a Facebook profile, even those who swore they would rather interact with others in person rather than through a social media app. He is also concerned, as he said, that it is "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." Has Facebook gone too deep? Only the future will tell.