Well Zuckerburg didn’t create the thing because he had some deep belief in high modernism or connecting people. People lie to themselves about their motivations. That’s a messy human thing too.
Whatever Facebook has become, it started out as a MySpace clone, without custom CSS, created by some Ivy League young men. Mythologizing it into some world-changing, higher purpose origin story is asinine.
I remember overhearing people laughing at how seriously some people took the relationship status posted on Facebook. People would put all manner of things on FB as one big joke. Like saying they were in a complicated relationship with their clearly platonic best friend.
These days, the web is basically an essential utility to participate in society. Just look at how many people are walking down the sidewalk with their face glued to their phones. Companies have tried to leverage this connectivity to spread information. Paper news is a dying industry, because they've all gone digital. It makes sense for people to get worked up these days. Communication via the internet (or at least digitally) is the de facto method. Teachers and professors used to chastise Wikipedia since anyone could edit it. However a lot of people realize that Wikipedia's citation system makes it a great research staring point. Connectivity is ubiquitous.
This isn't the same Internet culture from 2006, and it's odd to treat it like it is.
What I mean to say is that the Internet is currently more closely linked to reality than it was back then. Digital identities aren't necessarily a separate entity from who we are. It may be a version of ourselves that we want to represent, but they tend to represent a part of us. This is why you may not have cared if some dipshit harassed you online back then. The internet was a mere source of entertainment. Now that it's an arguable necessity, it's no longer just an avatar getting attacked or lied to; it's the person behind the keyboard.
But I have a feeling you are confusing things and timelines. Perhaps you are remembering the actual hot or not site that did just what you remember while thinking of the facemash or whatever that Zuckerberg made prior to FB that we probably all learned about when we watched The Social Network.