Facebook’s founder first built a campus photo-rating site that breached security.

Evidence

But a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg—a gifted programmer in full possession of all the arrogance of youth, who loved nothing more than to hack out code overnight—felt compelled to show he could do the job better and faster. Zuckerberg had already accomplished a number of complicated computer projects with his friends. “We were just building stuff,” he said later, ” ‘cause we thought it was cool.” Unfortunately, his last little effort, hacking the student picture database while under the influence, had landed him on academic probation. … I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive….Let the hacking begin. … With that he created Facemash, a Harvard-only version of the rating site “Hot or Not.” In Zuckerberg’s adaptation, two undergraduate women’s photos appeared, and the user selected the more attractive. Zuckerberg showed a certain flair for gaining attention, but after complaints, he went before the school’s Administration Board charged with breaching security, infringing the photograph copyrights, and violating individual privacy. He was let off with a warning. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 978

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the precedent of Facemash — a deliberately transgressive, sexually charged attention hack — anticipate the engagement-maximizing design culture that Facebook later institutionalized?