I was not impressed and had joked to one of his executives that Mr. Zuckerberg sounded like a jerk. So, of course, after an awkward hello, the first thing he ever said to me was: “I hear you think I’m an asshole.”

For the record, I never did, including after taking a walk with him around town. Taking walks was (and still is) his odd signature thing; every tech founder has one. (Jeff Bezos: doors for desks and that laugh; Sergey Brin: yoga pants and weird shoes; Elon Musk: so, so many, and all quite inventive.)

On that forced stroll, there was one word that he kept coming back to: Facebook was a “utility.”

It was a curious metaphor to choose, because it was not the effortlessly hip image of his rival back then, Myspace, nor the multicolored everlasting Willy Wonka party that was going on over at Google. It was a dull, blue, helpful, we-keep-the-lights-on-ma’am concept that was, thinking back on it, quite telling.

That’s because it was based in the idea that Facebook was essentially benign. Worse: Mr. Zuckerberg stuck with this mix of extreme earnestness and willful naïveté for far too long.

Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones.

Was it because he was a computer major who left college early and did not attend enough humanities courses that might have alerted him to the uglier aspects of human nature? Maybe. Or was it because he has since been steeped in the relentless positivity of Silicon Valley, where it is verboten to imagine a bad outcome? Likely. Could it be that while the goal was to “connect people,” he never anticipated that the platform also had to be responsible for those people when they misbehaved? Oh, yes. And, finally, was it that the all-numbers-go-up-and-to-the-right mentality of Facebook blinded him to the shortcuts that get taken in the service of growth? Most definitely.

These issues were all still on full display in a podcast interview I did with Mr. Zuckerberg a few weeks ago. You’d have imagined that all this time, and all the money and power he has collected, would have wisened him.