The Facebook I Knew Should Not Have Left Harvard
Even 20 years ago, the platform’s fatal flaws should have been obvious from our college dorm rooms.
Zuckerberg back on campus in 2011.
Photographer: Darren McCollester/Getty Images
When this week Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a photograph of his Facebook page from 20 years ago — back when it was “thefacebook” — it was, for me, a little like the sponge cake that cast Proust back in time. The bare-bones profile page felt achingly familiar because I was one of thefacebook’s first few dozen users.
In those first weeks, with just 1,000 or so Harvard students registered, the web site that would become Facebook was spartan in design and limited in what it promised. It hadn’t yet added all the compelling bells-and-whistles that have transformed the platform into the election-warping, government-shaking, memory-making behemoth it is today. In retrospect, though, some of its fatal flaws should perhaps have been obvious from the start.