You’re thinking of HotOrNot. A “face book” has been a staple of US universities for decades to help new students identify each other. They were literally printed booklets with people’s faces in it.
I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.
I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was only open to college students (and the domain name was thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe. There was no ranking of faces.
You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.
reply