I sense some snobbishness vs-a-vs the domain name academia.edu, even though it has the requisite global extension.
"It can't be as real as my college" is the reflexive response, always going for the existential, and feeling threatened. If you mean it has no dorms or physical campus spaces, you might be right (I'm not sure).
To me, it's just another walled garden with pretty flowers, many specimens, some of them Design Science related. I get to network from here, with my peers. I get notified when another scholar checks out my Python for Calculus or whatever.
