Facebook Campus

» see facebook.com/campus as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The original Facebook was a walled garden with a very specific wall: a university email address. That is the condition it launched under in 2004 and the condition it grew under for two years, and it is the thing everybody who was online then remembers about it, including those of us who could only read about it. On 10 September 2020 Facebook put the wall back up deliberately, as a product.

Campus was a section inside the Facebook app rather than a separate download. An .edu address got you in, and what you got was a feed restricted to your own school, with a student directory and chat rooms organized by dorm or club. It opened at roughly thirty American universities, Brown and Caltech among them. The company tied the launch to the pandemic directly: students were scattered away from campus that autumn, so staying connected to college life was now more important than ever.

MIT Technology Review ran the whole analysis in its headline on the day, which was that Facebook had just invented Facebook. That reads as a cheap shot and it was also the correct read. The company was nineteen years from its own founding and trying to buy its way back into the one condition that had made it work, except that this time the walled garden sat inside an app with nearly three billion people in it, which is not a walled garden at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the pilot measured ~

It expanded steadily on paper. Sixty schools by the middle of 2021 and two hundred and four by the time it closed, with new campuses still being added in January 2022, six weeks before the end. An expansion curve like that is what a team puts in front of management when engagement will not move, and engagement was not moving.

When the shutdown notice went out, reporters went looking for the reaction and found almost none. TechCrunch noted that very few users had commented on the loss at all, which for a product aimed at the most online demographic alive is the entire verdict. American undergraduates in 2021 were on Instagram and TikTok, and the ones using Facebook were using it to talk to relatives.

~ back to groups ~

The in-app message was short. The Campus pilot was ending, everything posted inside it would be deleted, and there was an export tool if you wanted your data first. Facebook's stated reasoning was that it had learned the most effective way to support college students was Facebook Groups, a feature that had existed the entire time Campus was being built.

I was thirty six that September and a working engineer in Ankara, so I was never eligible and no part of this was built with anyone like me in mind. My own university years ran from 2003 to 2010, which is the exact window when the real thing was .edu-gated and I was watching it from a Turkish campus on MSN. Seeing the same wall rebuilt in 2020 as a growth experiment was a strange thing to read about from that side of it.

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