8 ms·

Facebook Campus

87 points by uptown 6y ago

ghostpepper 6y ago
> Today, we are launching Facebook Campus, a college-only space This seems strangely familiar...
- synaesthesisx 6y ago
  It appears they've come full-circle.
- fredley 6y ago
  I remember the early days, when you could only join with a university account, and the only people you could interact with were others in the same network. Privacy controls were 'public' by default, but then the only people seeing stuff were fellow students anyway. It was fantastic. I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago for various reasons, but they had a really great product back then. Somehow I doubt this will capture the charm of v1.
  - gxqoz 6y ago
    The killer feature for me in Facebook's early days is that people could list the classes they had. This made it easy to message your classmates to get help on an assignment.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      I remember when they killed that feature. It was the same time they introduced an app platform. To replace the feature, there were competing class list apps, each requiring users install it and with its own data, so none of them worked. I remember thinking whoever made that decision probably didn't understand the feature. But they sure were motivated to build an app ecosystem nobody asked for.
    - RandallBrown 6y ago
      The coolest feature for me back then was seeing how you were related to another profile through the friend graph. It felt like you could click on any person in your school and find a path of friends that connected you.
  - citizenkeen 6y ago
    I was studying abroad when Facebook started expanding beyond Harvard. I was in a dorm filled with liberal arts students from across the US. I remember when about a third of us got "approved" for Facebook, and two thirds were just jealously wondering why their elite private liberal art schools weren't "good enough". I've never seen a clearer case of envy/FOMO.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      I artificial dislike artificial scarcity created by startups because they don't have something useful I would pay right away for. Share our site and you will get moved up in the queue and I will say no. It's okay to limit initial users but this is manipulative behaviour. I wonder if I should make an extension or site to list them all.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        I’d be curious to see such a list, just out of my own morbid curiosity.
      - Nbox9 6y ago
        > artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues. Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.
minimaxir 6y ago
Surprisingly, Harvard is not on the list of trial colleges.
xxpor 6y ago
Did Facebook invent a time machine to go back to 15 years ago?
choiway 6y ago
Is this an April Fools joke?
libraryofbabel 6y ago
I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New. It hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever smelt before. Bertolt Brecht, Parade of the Old New. (1939)
digitalsushi 6y ago
Jokes aside that this is how FB started, I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant, and that this might be a way to isolate and segregate people associated with colleges.
- munificent 6y ago
  > I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat. When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff. Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
  - ponker 6y ago
    But wouldn't that feedback loop work the other way too? That there's someone saying "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook"? Leaving just the people who enjoy screaming at each other?
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      > "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook" I think you misspelled "Twitter" :)
    - sevilo 6y ago
      it works both ways, the ironic thing is people on either side of the spectrum believe they're the good ones and the other side that should be removed by facebook, and don't recognize they're part of the problem themselves. I miss the days when Facebook was about sharing personal connections, stupid and fun stuff, as a shy kid in high school who didn't speak very good English, facebook has helped me made friends and connect with kids in my school as I was more comfortable talking to them online. Hard to imagine that would ever take place with the way Facebook is today, where you log on to scream at other people's political opinions which are different from yours.
adim86 6y ago
I think Facebook is bleeding college age people to Instagram (yes I know it is owned by FB), snapchat and the likes and this is serious ad revenue, if allowed to continue all spells the death of a platform. Form me this is a signal of fear or desperation to save the website facebook. Facebook the company is VERY fine and healthy, but I think Facebook the website is in trouble
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  I wonder what engagement on Facebook looks like overall. Anecdotally, I haven't seen many in my (older) circle "rage quitting" Facebook but I've seen a lot of people going from using it pretty regularly to using it rarely or to a first approximation of never.
- nerevarthelame 6y ago
  The release of this certainly means that they don't think that they're reaching as many college students as they could, which might be framed desperation, given FB's origins. But I personally think that's an overly pessimistic interpretation. I'm not sure what signs would point to the Facebook platform as a whole approaching "death." Their number of active users (for just Facebook, not Instagram or anything else) have been consistently growing each quarter - even specifically in the US.
  - graham_paul 6y ago
    It doesn't matter that you are getting more users if those users are old and that's basically what is happening to Facebook. FB these days is just a place where content gets recycled, original content, viral memes and cultural trends happen elsewhere (TT, IG, etc). Just try to list the number of public figures (that young people care about) that use FB as its main channel? Now compare that against TT, IG, etc. FB managed to buy IG and WhatsApp but they won't always be able to buy their competitor or copy them
    - 6y ago
tylercubell 6y ago
Yo dawg, I heard you like Facebook, so I put a Facebook in your Facebook so you can Facebook while you Facebook.
maxaht 6y ago
This would have been really cool maybe 8 years ago. Almost everyone I know at my university uses Facebook only for sharing "life updates" with older relatives who aren't on more trendy social media sites.
- ericlewis 6y ago
  This was really cool about 16 years ago, when Facebook launched. Because this is what Facebook used to be.
smoyer 6y ago
> Today, we are launching Facebook Campus, a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests. Facebook Campus makes it easy to find and start conversations within your college community. Tomorrow we're rebranding as "TheFacebook" and will only be available to Harvard students.
- zucked 6y ago
  Seriously - this is a rehashed version of Facebook when only open to '.edu' email accounts.
  - asdfman123 6y ago
    I think that's the point. Facebook was so much more fun when it was dumb college student stuff -- and not a forum for every person you know to view and comment on.
    - Nbox9 6y ago
      > Facebook was so much more fun when... Wow. It’s been a long time since I thought of Facebook as fun, and at this point it’s been not-fun longer than it’s been fun.
      - axaxs 6y ago
        Well, yeah. It was college only for only 3 years. For about 2-3 years after that it still skewed younger/techie, but past that has turned into a hellhole of vanity, inspirational posters, fwds from grandma, and politics. So, let's say fun for 5, awful for 12.
- servercobra 6y ago
  Amusingly, it is not launching for Harvard students this time around. The campus list seems very odd and scattershot.
  - 6y ago
throwawaysea 6y ago
When Facebook first launched and was only available on certain campuses, it had an intimate and safe feeling. It was used primarily to share experiences with friends. The site was simple and compact. Feeds had a high signal to noise ratio, and it was about personal connection rather than political warfare. Somehow, unless they take on a content policy that bans news/politics/etc, I doubt they can get back to that place from where society is today. Even if the software was exactly the same as it was, we have changed and we have been changed in large part by social media these last 15 years.
- kube-system 6y ago
  A ban on political content won’t make fb what it was before. The toxic political content is a symptom of the problem, not a cause. The community is the difference. Social bubbles on fb are now huge, and include people with wildly varying ideas for what they want to get out of social media. People naturally segregate different aspects of their social life in their real-world interactions, but that nuance is completely lost on fb.
ve55 6y ago
I view one of the largest reasons for this as trying to ensure they keep user retention for younger demographics for live chat, which they've been lagging behind quite a bit compared to e.g. Discord. If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them. This will be tough as Discord is currently happily enjoying its unlimited growth and no profits phase, and has enough network effects that it's almost impossible to not use it as a young Internet-using male in many countries.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Or if you are an open source developer. Many projects have moved to discord only approach with no public forums.
- Nbox9 6y ago
  > If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them. Facebook has had incredible success at mimicking other companies’ features, and when that fails purchasing major competitors. Discord is still niche, and I suspect their marketing and image will make it hard to break out of ‘gamer’ culture.
  - _bohm 6y ago
    Just as a data point: I'm a member of several Discord communities, none of which are gaming-related. I've also noticed more recently that people are starting Discord communities around all kinds of non-gaming topics. Very commonly they seem to revolve around a public persona, like a YouTube celebrity, a musician, or a podcast host.
  - ve55 6y ago
    I disagree that Discord is niche at this point. They're already worth several billion and it's still growing significantly, with perhaps several hundred million users and very high user-retention, usage, network effects, and proprietary lock-in. I'd still invest in Discord today if I could, in a heartbeat.
s3r3nity 6y ago
I think the Facebook site will be _very_ different in the next few years than what we're traditionally used to. The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why: 1) Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion 2) Messenger has gotten quite a bit of UX improvements 3) New features like "Rooms," which favor small / intimate video conversations 4) Investments in hardware experiences like Portal, which have been heavily marketed towards family communication thus far (successfully it seems, looking at their last revenue #'s.) 5) Facebook Workplace, which was a smart B2B play anyway, but also aligns with their "micro-community" approach Zuck messaged this new pivot IIRC around the last US presidential election, but it may have started before that. Therefore I would expect to see more of these types of experiences: "Facebook Campus" - "Facebook Workplace" - "Facebook [TBD]"
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  What's interesting about your comment is how Facebook, as an online community, has lost all context that other online communities had. Think about people griping about work. You could do that in older online communities, but now that everyone knows everyone on Facebook, a gripe about work is probably going to be seen by your colleagues and potential employers and... Basically, the concept of an online community that has boundaries away from your IRL (in real life) community is gone. (Or, everyone's mother and kids have Facebook accounts.)
  - asdff 6y ago
    I remember that fateful day in highschool where the parents volte-faced and joined facebook, and the site was ruined forever. then came the aunts and uncles and grandma and your boss from two jobs ago. eternal september, but the influx didn't ever stop and here we are with billions of users and a mess.
- ianhawes 6y ago
  You can't forget about Facebook Marketplace, which is arguably more successful than Groups.
koolba 6y ago
Any idea if the schools are getting directly or indirectly paid to be a part of this?
zacharycohn 6y ago
Everything old is new again.
jimmysong 6y ago
I guess Facebook is coming for Reddit.
gdsdfe 6y ago
haha full circle
nscalf 6y ago
Aside from the "Facebook just launched Facebook" side of this, I think it's really interesting that they're launching this on Facebook instead of acquiring/building a new network. It seems like social networks roll on cycles, you don't want to use your older sibling's social network. Their acquisitions also hint that they agree. My guess is that there is some concern internally about owning another major social network, combined with dropping numbers of young people coming on to Facebook.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  Speculating: maybe they want to pipeline former students to their main product after they graduate. Maybe they decided instead of risk another social media site going through the same lifecycle as Facebook did and fragmenting market share, they could keep it all under one roof. I suppose it could also be an attempt to keep the engineering simpler, too. Hardly an expert, though.
kome 6y ago
My university is a joke, and therefore I am sure they will adopt this soon without thinking to any of the consequences. Basically Facebook want to fully substitute email within colleges. What could go wrong? This is not for users, it is more for university admins.
chendragon 6y ago
Might be unrelated, but when I visit this page in a private browsing session on iOS 14 and play the video I get a modal saying Facebook would like to use cookies and website data, and if you allow they can track me. If I don't allow, the video stops playing. If I do nothing, the video plays in the background. https://ibb.co/Bc2t2mK https://ibb.co/Bc2t2mK
azangru 6y ago
They want to make Facebook cool again?
actuator 6y ago
If FB doesn't have a play on education yet, they might want to capitalise on remote classes through video/transcripts. Possibly have a piazza equivalent built in and make it more accessible to schools.
ape4 6y ago
"Hello fellow kids"
IvyMike 6y ago
The Poochie of social networks.
sriram_sun 6y ago
So cost of entry is $20k and up per year? In other news, Deans of admission might be silently thanking Zuck for this feature!
jl2718 6y ago
Next will be Facebook takes on business networks with something like Blind with strong identity.
- b_ocu 6y ago
  Checkout workplace.com
deeeeeplearning 6y ago
Actually Mindblown. Next thing you know Google is going to release "Google Search, find what you're looking for on the internet!"
- bcatanzaro 6y ago
  You know. A product focused only on search and not on advertising, where the goal was really to help people find what they're looking for - that might be a revolutionary product. And Google would be in a great position to launch it...
tempodox 6y ago
That name sounds like a place where you can get a degree in user tracking. I'm almost disappointed.
stinger 6y ago
Did facebook just relaunch facebook?
- holler 6y ago
  lol, so meta...
bilater 6y ago
Did they just...go back to 2006?
rllearneratwork 6y ago
glad to see my alma mater NOT in the list.
beenBoutIT 6y ago
Keeping college separate from the world at large is a good idea. Back when Facebook was exclusive to people with university '.edu' email accounts there was a massive shitstorm when everything got opened up to the general public. All of the sudden pictures of students drinking and doing drugs were visible to potential employers, non-students and the 'real world'. It seems that this new Facebook for universities won't have the same problem as it's not going to be merged back with regular FB.
bcatanzaro 6y ago
The circle of life has rotated - we're now in a position where "Facebook but for Facebook" is an innovation. ;)
12xo 6y ago
Facebook is AOL circa 1997. When it seemed that they'd be a dominate player forever... Fast forward a few years and were are almost non-existent. A few more and they were gone all together. Never forget that the internet is awash in dead companies and sites that were extremely popular and powerful, until they werent. Facebook is a giant, but its dominance in the USA and the EU is likely short lived.
- dweekly 6y ago
  And the same comment was made about Facebook practically a decade ago, pointing to MySpace and Friendster. Yet DAU, MAU, and engagement continue to grow. Some of this, perhaps, is due to Facebook's keen awareness of its own mortality and the several times that they had to navigate out of near existential crises. Just look on the backside of the logo out front of their HQ. Memento mori.
  - 12xo 6y ago
    Yeah but those are not my comments, and it's not today. It is not competition that will kill Facebook, its the change in people's behavior. Very different from the competitive view you take. The death of Facebook will be from both in how people interact with each other and tech. Whether its a fundamental shift in comm(mobile phones) or a leap in tech like serverless / peer to peer that removes the need for a central service. Eventually, Facebook will not exist anywhere near its current form. Remember, FB not a service like Google that serves the user. You dont need them to do anything but connect to other people. If you dont need to use FB, you wont. For now, its easier and working very well at scale. But that's temporary. Maybe 10 years. Maybe longer... One day it too will be a memory, owned and operated by a PE firm that specializes in brands.
limeblack 6y ago
A mobile version of messenger.com would be nice also. On budget phones(think 8GBs) web apps are the best solution but yet there is only a mobile version of Facebook.com.
nateburke 6y ago
Announcing: Microsoft Operating System Amazon Online Bookstore Google Internet Search

Facebook Campus

87 points by uptown 6y ago

ghostpepper 6y ago

> Today, we are launching Facebook Campus, a college-only space This seems strangely familiar...

synaesthesisx 6y ago
It appears they've come full-circle.
fredley 6y ago
I remember the early days, when you could only join with a university account, and the only people you could interact with were others in the same network. Privacy controls were 'public' by default, but then the only people seeing stuff were fellow students anyway. It was fantastic. I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago for various reasons, but they had a really great product back then. Somehow I doubt this will capture the charm of v1.
- gxqoz 6y ago
  The killer feature for me in Facebook's early days is that people could list the classes they had. This made it easy to message your classmates to get help on an assignment.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I remember when they killed that feature. It was the same time they introduced an app platform. To replace the feature, there were competing class list apps, each requiring users install it and with its own data, so none of them worked. I remember thinking whoever made that decision probably didn't understand the feature. But they sure were motivated to build an app ecosystem nobody asked for.
  - RandallBrown 6y ago
    The coolest feature for me back then was seeing how you were related to another profile through the friend graph. It felt like you could click on any person in your school and find a path of friends that connected you.
- citizenkeen 6y ago
  I was studying abroad when Facebook started expanding beyond Harvard. I was in a dorm filled with liberal arts students from across the US. I remember when about a third of us got "approved" for Facebook, and two thirds were just jealously wondering why their elite private liberal art schools weren't "good enough". I've never seen a clearer case of envy/FOMO.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I artificial dislike artificial scarcity created by startups because they don't have something useful I would pay right away for. Share our site and you will get moved up in the queue and I will say no. It's okay to limit initial users but this is manipulative behaviour. I wonder if I should make an extension or site to list them all.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      I’d be curious to see such a list, just out of my own morbid curiosity.
    - Nbox9 6y ago
      > artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues. Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.

minimaxir 6y ago

Surprisingly, Harvard is not on the list of trial colleges.

xxpor 6y ago

Did Facebook invent a time machine to go back to 15 years ago?

choiway 6y ago

Is this an April Fools joke?

libraryofbabel 6y ago

I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New. It hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever smelt before. Bertolt Brecht, Parade of the Old New. (1939)

digitalsushi 6y ago

Jokes aside that this is how FB started, I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant, and that this might be a way to isolate and segregate people associated with colleges.

munificent 6y ago
> I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat. When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff. Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
- ponker 6y ago
  But wouldn't that feedback loop work the other way too? That there's someone saying "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook"? Leaving just the people who enjoy screaming at each other?
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook" I think you misspelled "Twitter" :)
  - sevilo 6y ago
    it works both ways, the ironic thing is people on either side of the spectrum believe they're the good ones and the other side that should be removed by facebook, and don't recognize they're part of the problem themselves. I miss the days when Facebook was about sharing personal connections, stupid and fun stuff, as a shy kid in high school who didn't speak very good English, facebook has helped me made friends and connect with kids in my school as I was more comfortable talking to them online. Hard to imagine that would ever take place with the way Facebook is today, where you log on to scream at other people's political opinions which are different from yours.

adim86 6y ago

I think Facebook is bleeding college age people to Instagram (yes I know it is owned by FB), snapchat and the likes and this is serious ad revenue, if allowed to continue all spells the death of a platform. Form me this is a signal of fear or desperation to save the website facebook. Facebook the company is VERY fine and healthy, but I think Facebook the website is in trouble

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
I wonder what engagement on Facebook looks like overall. Anecdotally, I haven't seen many in my (older) circle "rage quitting" Facebook but I've seen a lot of people going from using it pretty regularly to using it rarely or to a first approximation of never.
nerevarthelame 6y ago
The release of this certainly means that they don't think that they're reaching as many college students as they could, which might be framed desperation, given FB's origins. But I personally think that's an overly pessimistic interpretation. I'm not sure what signs would point to the Facebook platform as a whole approaching "death." Their number of active users (for just Facebook, not Instagram or anything else) have been consistently growing each quarter - even specifically in the US.
- graham_paul 6y ago
  It doesn't matter that you are getting more users if those users are old and that's basically what is happening to Facebook. FB these days is just a place where content gets recycled, original content, viral memes and cultural trends happen elsewhere (TT, IG, etc). Just try to list the number of public figures (that young people care about) that use FB as its main channel? Now compare that against TT, IG, etc. FB managed to buy IG and WhatsApp but they won't always be able to buy their competitor or copy them
  - 6y ago

tylercubell 6y ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like Facebook, so I put a Facebook in your Facebook so you can Facebook while you Facebook.

maxaht 6y ago

This would have been really cool maybe 8 years ago. Almost everyone I know at my university uses Facebook only for sharing "life updates" with older relatives who aren't on more trendy social media sites.

ericlewis 6y ago
This was really cool about 16 years ago, when Facebook launched. Because this is what Facebook used to be.

smoyer 6y ago

> Today, we are launching Facebook Campus, a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests. Facebook Campus makes it easy to find and start conversations within your college community. Tomorrow we're rebranding as "TheFacebook" and will only be available to Harvard students.

zucked 6y ago
Seriously - this is a rehashed version of Facebook when only open to '.edu' email accounts.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  I think that's the point. Facebook was so much more fun when it was dumb college student stuff -- and not a forum for every person you know to view and comment on.
  - Nbox9 6y ago
    > Facebook was so much more fun when... Wow. It’s been a long time since I thought of Facebook as fun, and at this point it’s been not-fun longer than it’s been fun.
    - axaxs 6y ago
      Well, yeah. It was college only for only 3 years. For about 2-3 years after that it still skewed younger/techie, but past that has turned into a hellhole of vanity, inspirational posters, fwds from grandma, and politics. So, let's say fun for 5, awful for 12.
servercobra 6y ago
Amusingly, it is not launching for Harvard students this time around. The campus list seems very odd and scattershot.
- 6y ago

throwawaysea 6y ago

When Facebook first launched and was only available on certain campuses, it had an intimate and safe feeling. It was used primarily to share experiences with friends. The site was simple and compact. Feeds had a high signal to noise ratio, and it was about personal connection rather than political warfare. Somehow, unless they take on a content policy that bans news/politics/etc, I doubt they can get back to that place from where society is today. Even if the software was exactly the same as it was, we have changed and we have been changed in large part by social media these last 15 years.

kube-system 6y ago
A ban on political content won’t make fb what it was before. The toxic political content is a symptom of the problem, not a cause. The community is the difference. Social bubbles on fb are now huge, and include people with wildly varying ideas for what they want to get out of social media. People naturally segregate different aspects of their social life in their real-world interactions, but that nuance is completely lost on fb.

ve55 6y ago

I view one of the largest reasons for this as trying to ensure they keep user retention for younger demographics for live chat, which they've been lagging behind quite a bit compared to e.g. Discord. If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them. This will be tough as Discord is currently happily enjoying its unlimited growth and no profits phase, and has enough network effects that it's almost impossible to not use it as a young Internet-using male in many countries.

searchableguy 6y ago
Or if you are an open source developer. Many projects have moved to discord only approach with no public forums.
Nbox9 6y ago
> If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them. Facebook has had incredible success at mimicking other companies’ features, and when that fails purchasing major competitors. Discord is still niche, and I suspect their marketing and image will make it hard to break out of ‘gamer’ culture.
- _bohm 6y ago
  Just as a data point: I'm a member of several Discord communities, none of which are gaming-related. I've also noticed more recently that people are starting Discord communities around all kinds of non-gaming topics. Very commonly they seem to revolve around a public persona, like a YouTube celebrity, a musician, or a podcast host.
- ve55 6y ago
  I disagree that Discord is niche at this point. They're already worth several billion and it's still growing significantly, with perhaps several hundred million users and very high user-retention, usage, network effects, and proprietary lock-in. I'd still invest in Discord today if I could, in a heartbeat.

s3r3nity 6y ago

I think the Facebook site will be _very_ different in the next few years than what we're traditionally used to. The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why: 1) Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion 2) Messenger has gotten quite a bit of UX improvements 3) New features like "Rooms," which favor small / intimate video conversations 4) Investments in hardware experiences like Portal, which have been heavily marketed towards family communication thus far (successfully it seems, looking at their last revenue #'s.) 5) Facebook Workplace, which was a smart B2B play anyway, but also aligns with their "micro-community" approach Zuck messaged this new pivot IIRC around the last US presidential election, but it may have started before that. Therefore I would expect to see more of these types of experiences: "Facebook Campus" - "Facebook Workplace" - "Facebook [TBD]"

gwbas1c 6y ago
What's interesting about your comment is how Facebook, as an online community, has lost all context that other online communities had. Think about people griping about work. You could do that in older online communities, but now that everyone knows everyone on Facebook, a gripe about work is probably going to be seen by your colleagues and potential employers and... Basically, the concept of an online community that has boundaries away from your IRL (in real life) community is gone. (Or, everyone's mother and kids have Facebook accounts.)
- asdff 6y ago
  I remember that fateful day in highschool where the parents volte-faced and joined facebook, and the site was ruined forever. then came the aunts and uncles and grandma and your boss from two jobs ago. eternal september, but the influx didn't ever stop and here we are with billions of users and a mess.
ianhawes 6y ago
You can't forget about Facebook Marketplace, which is arguably more successful than Groups.

koolba 6y ago

Any idea if the schools are getting directly or indirectly paid to be a part of this?

zacharycohn 6y ago

Everything old is new again.

jimmysong 6y ago

I guess Facebook is coming for Reddit.

gdsdfe 6y ago

haha full circle

nscalf 6y ago

Aside from the "Facebook just launched Facebook" side of this, I think it's really interesting that they're launching this on Facebook instead of acquiring/building a new network. It seems like social networks roll on cycles, you don't want to use your older sibling's social network. Their acquisitions also hint that they agree. My guess is that there is some concern internally about owning another major social network, combined with dropping numbers of young people coming on to Facebook.

asdfman123 6y ago
Speculating: maybe they want to pipeline former students to their main product after they graduate. Maybe they decided instead of risk another social media site going through the same lifecycle as Facebook did and fragmenting market share, they could keep it all under one roof. I suppose it could also be an attempt to keep the engineering simpler, too. Hardly an expert, though.

kome 6y ago

My university is a joke, and therefore I am sure they will adopt this soon without thinking to any of the consequences. Basically Facebook want to fully substitute email within colleges. What could go wrong? This is not for users, it is more for university admins.

chendragon 6y ago

Might be unrelated, but when I visit this page in a private browsing session on iOS 14 and play the video I get a modal saying Facebook would like to use cookies and website data, and if you allow they can track me. If I don't allow, the video stops playing. If I do nothing, the video plays in the background. https://ibb.co/Bc2t2mK https://ibb.co/Bc2t2mK

azangru 6y ago

They want to make Facebook cool again?

actuator 6y ago

If FB doesn't have a play on education yet, they might want to capitalise on remote classes through video/transcripts. Possibly have a piazza equivalent built in and make it more accessible to schools.

ape4 6y ago

"Hello fellow kids"

IvyMike 6y ago

The Poochie of social networks.

sriram_sun 6y ago

So cost of entry is $20k and up per year? In other news, Deans of admission might be silently thanking Zuck for this feature!

jl2718 6y ago

Next will be Facebook takes on business networks with something like Blind with strong identity.

b_ocu 6y ago
Checkout workplace.com

deeeeeplearning 6y ago

Actually Mindblown. Next thing you know Google is going to release "Google Search, find what you're looking for on the internet!"

bcatanzaro 6y ago
You know. A product focused only on search and not on advertising, where the goal was really to help people find what they're looking for - that might be a revolutionary product. And Google would be in a great position to launch it...

tempodox 6y ago

That name sounds like a place where you can get a degree in user tracking. I'm almost disappointed.

stinger 6y ago

Did facebook just relaunch facebook?

holler 6y ago
lol, so meta...

bilater 6y ago

Did they just...go back to 2006?

rllearneratwork 6y ago

glad to see my alma mater NOT in the list.

beenBoutIT 6y ago

Keeping college separate from the world at large is a good idea. Back when Facebook was exclusive to people with university '.edu' email accounts there was a massive shitstorm when everything got opened up to the general public. All of the sudden pictures of students drinking and doing drugs were visible to potential employers, non-students and the 'real world'. It seems that this new Facebook for universities won't have the same problem as it's not going to be merged back with regular FB.

bcatanzaro 6y ago

The circle of life has rotated - we're now in a position where "Facebook but for Facebook" is an innovation. ;)

12xo 6y ago

Facebook is AOL circa 1997. When it seemed that they'd be a dominate player forever... Fast forward a few years and were are almost non-existent. A few more and they were gone all together. Never forget that the internet is awash in dead companies and sites that were extremely popular and powerful, until they werent. Facebook is a giant, but its dominance in the USA and the EU is likely short lived.

dweekly 6y ago
And the same comment was made about Facebook practically a decade ago, pointing to MySpace and Friendster. Yet DAU, MAU, and engagement continue to grow. Some of this, perhaps, is due to Facebook's keen awareness of its own mortality and the several times that they had to navigate out of near existential crises. Just look on the backside of the logo out front of their HQ. Memento mori.
- 12xo 6y ago
  Yeah but those are not my comments, and it's not today. It is not competition that will kill Facebook, its the change in people's behavior. Very different from the competitive view you take. The death of Facebook will be from both in how people interact with each other and tech. Whether its a fundamental shift in comm(mobile phones) or a leap in tech like serverless / peer to peer that removes the need for a central service. Eventually, Facebook will not exist anywhere near its current form. Remember, FB not a service like Google that serves the user. You dont need them to do anything but connect to other people. If you dont need to use FB, you wont. For now, its easier and working very well at scale. But that's temporary. Maybe 10 years. Maybe longer... One day it too will be a memory, owned and operated by a PE firm that specializes in brands.

limeblack 6y ago

A mobile version of messenger.com would be nice also. On budget phones(think 8GBs) web apps are the best solution but yet there is only a mobile version of Facebook.com.

nateburke 6y ago

Announcing: Microsoft Operating System Amazon Online Bookstore Google Internet Search