It allows me to keep in contact with many of my close friends and my family who live on three continent and more countries than I can count on a daily basis, has helped me find work a dozen times, has provided several companies who I worked for with credible identity, spectacular growth via targeted advertising. I can use Uber, AirBnB and so many more and not fear that the people with whom I share a car or a flat with are dangerous because those companies use Facebook profiles to credibly exclude problematic participants. That’s not me being idealistic: before that, I’ve tried email, CouchSurf, working for company based on email-and-password for almost a decade.

It allows me to find interesting view point on current issues and to exclude toxic people from my social circle. I know who the people that I’m talking to are from, what they stand for and I can get that, say, that friend of a friend is probably joking when he’s teasing our common friend about the US Government because… well, he works for the Department of Energy -- that saves me the effort to rant and mansplain to them how gas market works.

I’ve moved more than a dozen times, both before and after Facebook: before, you’d need months to find friends and you were limited to classmates, colleagues, religious affiliation; earlier this year, I’ve moved to a mid-sized city and I knew I could find fun people to find a beer on my first night here -- whether those were games, hobby or language-based local groups. I got to explain to my cousin who was an aspiring film-maker how to grow his social presence and drive audience at festival, and he’s now reasonably successful.

There is so much more Facebook did: I was in London during 7/7 and there again, during the London Bridge attack -- I can assure you that Safety check saved my loved ones a second heart attack. I met my fiancée at a party and we couldn’t swap numbers because neither of us really knew whether it would make sense, but we didn’t had to explain what technology we meant when we suggested “Let’s write each other for a bit and see what goes”. I remember trying to do the same couple of years earlier for a party where I had nothing but an email list; talk about a series of embarrassing messages to find which one of the seven Julies was the right one.

I could go on: there’s a lot more it allowed me to do, as an employee, things I can’t talk about but that I’m incredibly proud of, and that have made the world a meaningfully better place.

Now, I’m trying to change my current employer’s very painfully silo-ed culture, to find people in the very large organisation that acquired us four month ago, to explain how to structure a data science project between analyst, different types of engineers, train, get feedback: Workplace, the Facebook-like software is an absolute blessing to leverage my single, anecdotic experience; to isolate motivated, like-minded people; to drive effective corporate change.

What I think is impressive now is that Facebook is showing how to properly react to a scandal by explaining it to stakeholders who don’t really seem to want to listen, but throw mud; move on an do the right thing because, still, far more people don’t care than those who do -- and those who do aren’t exactly forthcoming to help. Even now, the company is exposing itself to more criticism because that’s the right thing to do.

That might not be ‘a gift to mankind’ but, to me, personally, that response who actively avoid confrontation teaches me that I should be helpful and constructive, even when I’m dealing with dimwits. That I should fight my instinct to respond to a troll on Hacker News, say: “No, asshole, it’s not a gift to mankind but somehow you are too much a low-brow mouth-breathing impulsive cretin to imagine that the opposite of an ‘abomination’ has to be a gift to mankind.” because I’m not the kind of person who gains by speaking in absolutes, or insults, not do I want to be.

Overall, it’s fairly positive, I would say.