At least for a subset, 2005-2006, back when they had network pages. You'd gain access based on your email's domain, it has a shared calendar and worked as a planning location for everyone at the same college/university.
It had a purpose, it solved it better than previous options, and (critically!) it had a ceiling on today addressable userbase.
Once it metastisized into "extract maximum revenue from maximum number of people," I think its soul was lost to greed.
But eventually they burnt so much goodwill trying to justify their stock valuation that at least were I am, all those informal groups have moved away from Facebook. Some managed to substitute the infrastructure quite well, some suffer quite noticeably. But none of them would consider going back. And openness to newcomers, discoverability, that has all suffered quite considerably.
A topic for another discussion is why society allows corporations to become parasitic and cancerous without any checks or balances.
Germany would probably be the best counter-example to look at? Re: how to create and maintain medium-sized businesses that are still efficient.
You mean, when it was a sort of amihotornot for Harvard students?
I'd say there is a case for it being neutral for society for a fair chunk of time in its early days. Things don't have to be good/bad binary.
IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true.
It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, pull tons of people in, and will then start to make use of all that precious data.
It would boggle my mind if somebody was actually surprised by this.