Am I the only one that remembers that back in, oh 2006ish, one of the core features of Facebook was a hot-or-not picture rating game? Or that one of the other big features was "poking" people?
Whatever Facebook has become, it started out as a MySpace clone, without custom CSS, created by some Ivy League young men. Mythologizing it into some world-changing, higher purpose origin story is asinine.
Agreed, I have a similar take on people who actually get so worked up by something they read on the internet as to harm people or themselves. Before 2006, the response to someone ho believed something truly, obviously false from the internet was to laugh “wait, you actually believed something you read on the inteenet?!”
I remember overhearing people laughing at how seriously some people took the relationship status posted on Facebook. People would put all manner of things on FB as one big joke. Like saying they were in a complicated relationship with their clearly platonic best friend.
Back in 2006, the web was still largely something for nerds. The average person wasn't putting up the same time online as, for example, an MMO player whereas today, the average user is online just as much or more than an "early adopter". Average people would have checked the weather, gotten directions somewhere, maybe scrolled through an article or two, checked sports scores, etc. It was always something shallow that could be handled quickly. So yeah, making fun of someone for believing Internet trash was commonplace, because it was barely a source for good information.
These days, the web is basically an essential utility to participate in society. Just look at how many people are walking down the sidewalk with their face glued to their phones. Companies have tried to leverage this connectivity to spread information. Paper news is a dying industry, because they've all gone digital. It makes sense for people to get worked up these days. Communication via the internet (or at least digitally) is the de facto method. Teachers and professors used to chastise Wikipedia since anyone could edit it. However a lot of people realize that Wikipedia's citation system makes it a great research staring point. Connectivity is ubiquitous.
This isn't the same Internet culture from 2006, and it's odd to treat it like it is.
It's not that people can't lie on the Internet. Back then, it was more or less expected that whatever was written on the Internet is no more truthful than someone telling a story. One of the major differences was that people we're necessarily tied to their online personas like we are today.
What I mean to say is that the Internet is currently more closely linked to reality than it was back then. Digital identities aren't necessarily a separate entity from who we are. It may be a version of ourselves that we want to represent, but they tend to represent a part of us. This is why you may not have cared if some dipshit harassed you online back then. The internet was a mere source of entertainment. Now that it's an arguable necessity, it's no longer just an avatar getting attacked or lied to; it's the person behind the keyboard.
I was a relatively early adopter to Facebook, though not Harvard- or Ivy League-early. It didn't have a hot-or-not style rating at that time. Poking was a feature, but I'm not sure it was ever that popular.
It's a site that predates Facebook: Facemash used "photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the “hotter” person"
It was definitely still part of Facebook when it started rolling out beyond colleges to high school students around 2005/2006. I remember people spending way too much time rating randos in study halls back then.
Are you sure that wasn't hotornot.com or something similar? I've been on Facebook since back when it was still segmented by college (connections with people at other colleges were clunky), and I don't recall it ever having a built-in "hot or not" feature.
I think I recall what he might be talking about. I remember several third party apps within Facebook that served a similar function being popular back in the early days of Facebook. It's totally reasonable that someone might fuzzily confuse one of those for core features after a decade or so.
I agree with the initial premise, origin story more likely was nerd bros desperately wanted to get rich and get laid. Connecting the world only came around when they were told they couldn't put that into their business plan template as their mission statement.
But I have a feeling you are confusing things and timelines. Perhaps you are remembering the actual hot or not site that did just what you remember while thinking of the facemash or whatever that Zuckerberg made prior to FB that we probably all learned about when we watched The Social Network.
People change, though. The human condition is one of constantly justifying and explaining your actions and coming up with a story to arrange everything into. I think the story of Facebook as an "idealist" company is one that Zuckerberg and friends have genuinely taken to heart.
Whatever Facebook has become, it started out as a MySpace clone, without custom CSS, created by some Ivy League young men. Mythologizing it into some world-changing, higher purpose origin story is asinine.