Fifteen years ago today, I launched the first version of the Facebook website from my college dorm.
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Within a couple of weeks, two-thirds of Harvard students were using Facebook almost every day. In the next couple of months, students from other places emailed me and my roommates to launch at their schools, and we opened at almost 30 schools. Within a year, more than one million students were connecting on the site. In a couple of years, we were working on making the service available to everyone.
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As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society – from government to business to media to communities and more – there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy.
He built the first prototype not to connect people, but to help Harvard dudebros objectify women. The next iteration was to allow Harvard students to network. Then he expanded to allow students from the Ivies to network, and then college students at top-tier universities. It wasn’t until 2006 that he started allowing the hoi polloi on.
The intent in the early days was not to replace traditional hierarchies, but to re-inforce them. Once he changed the narrative and advertising business model from that to wanting to connect everyone (and not out of idealism), he threw responsibility out the window.
