When WIRED introduced Facebook to its online readers in 2004, four months after Mark Zuckerberg launched the site with a few friends out of his Harvard dorm room, the first order of business was explaining the poke. “On Thefacebook, poking is a way of saying ‘hi’ to would-be contacts, a method to strike up a conversation without adding the person as a friend,” went the post. “And there's quite a bit of poking going on.” From there, the story went on to describe the latest social network sweeping college campuses. All 34 of them.

If one phrase is going to be repeated ad nauseum around the 15th anniversary of Facebook’s creation, it’s that a lot has changed. The company has expanded from an exclusive platform for American college students to one of the biggest, most powerful communication and advertising companies in the world---a one-stop shop for sharing photos, consuming news, messaging friends, buying and selling goods--and, in some countries, essentially the internet itself. It employs tens of thousands of people, has more than 2 billion users, and makes even more billions of dollars.

Looking back at 15 years of WIRED’s Facebook coverage may strike some as a myopic or self-serving exercise (Can I interest you in these stories from our archive?!), but it carries some useful reminders. Events of the past few years have led to calls for more ethical tech—for engineers and designers to more fully anticipate the range of impacts their products could have on society, intended or not, and think about how their tools might be used for harm as well as for good. (The tech press and users would do well to consider those things, too.)

It certainly wasn’t clear from the outset that Facebook would become the force it is today—even if Zuckerberg did end weekly meetings chanting “Domination.” Facebook was just one dainty wildflower in a vast garden of social networks, and every day it seemed like a new one popped up. Tribes, Flickr, Orkut, Bebo. None of them were making money. They didn’t seem to have that much staying power, either. SixDegrees.com had come and gone; Friendster was already giving way to MySpace.

In fact, it was only after News Corp acquired MySpace in 2006 that Facebook had its first mention in the IRL printed pages of WIRED magazine. In contrast to cool teen hangout MySpace—which News Corp hoped to mine for insights into social media virality—Facebook, WIRED wrote, “avoids out-of-control content like an STD.” So, yes, things have changed!

Emily Shur In October 2007, Fred Vogelstein’s profile, “Saving Facebook,” charted how Zuckerberg led the company’s transformation “from second-tier social network to full-fledged platform that organizes the entire Internet.” Emily Shur

As Facebook’s user base ticked up by the thousands and then millions, the questions WIRED asked about the company changed. “What is this thing?” morphed pretty quickly into “But will it make money and (by implication) survive?” The answer to that one turned out to be yes.

Mark Zuckerberg was always fairly upfront about his desire to get people to share their personal information, lots of it, on the platform he controlled. “Facebook has always emphasized two qualities that tend to be undervalued online: authenticity and identity,” contributing writer Fred Vogelstein wrote in an October 2007 profile. “Users are encouraged to post personal information—colleges attended, workplaces, email addresses. Facebook also emphasizes honesty: Because users typically can view profiles only of people they’re linked to, and they can’t link to them unless both partners confirm the relationship, there’s little point in creating a fake identity.” (That, of course, would not always be the case.)

Early on in the pages of WIRED, a portrait emerged of a young CEO determined to radically reshape the concept of privacy in the digital age, no matter how much pushback he got from the public. Take, for example, Facebook’s rollout of the News Feed in 2006. Users hated it, protesting en masse and threatening boycotts. “The easiest thing for Zuckerberg to do was simply dismantle News Feed,” Vogelstein recounted. “But he refused. News Feed was not just any feature. It was the infrastructure to undergird the social graph. So, three days after the feature launched, he posted a 485-word open letter to his users, apologizing for the surprise and explaining how they could opt out of News Feed if they wished. The tactic worked; the controversy ended as quickly as it began, with no real impact on user growth.”