Facebook initially started by downloading the photos off the individual house websites at Harvard. They were banned pretty quickly, but it got them attention. I think they switched to user-uploaded photos fairly soon afterwards (though I think a coworker told me that they were still scraping photos while they were Harvard-only); they'd definitely stopped by the time they got to Amherst in Oct 2004.
That was Facemash, rather than Facebook. Facemash was a 'hot or not' style site that Zuckerberg put together. I don't think Facebook ever actually scraped content for seeding purposes.
To be honest, the rate stuff spreads over campus list-servs I really don't think it was required at that point.
