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Once a staple of Millennial internet use, Facebook has reintroduced the long-defunct ‘poke’ feature to its platform, allowing users to mildly annoy one another at their leisure.
If you’re a Millennial, you probably know exactly what we mean when discussing Facebook’s long lost ‘poke’ feature.
Although simple, the ‘poke’ button allowed friends to flirt with one another, receive attention, or simply keep up a long-running gag for the thrill of it. There was nothing else to it besides simply notifying the recipient, but it was fun – and popular – well over a decade ago.
.@facebook’s poke button returns – much to the delight of Gen Z
According to Facebook, more than half of the pokes are coming from Gen Z and Millennials https://t.co/nOFuUBXYaf
— NME (@NME) March 20, 2024
Although it never technically disappeared for good, Facebook buried the ability to ‘poke’ other users via a niche search term many years back, meaning that you had to go out of your way to find it.
Now, in a recent UI update, it seems the company is slowly soft-launching ‘poking’ back into the mainstream.
So far it seems to have been a hit, with Meta reporting a 13x surge in ‘poking’ between users. What does that actually mean in real terms? We’ll let you be the judge of that, as Meta hasn’t given specific metrics just yet.
