Flirt like it’s the early 2010s.
The “Poke” feature is back on Facebook — and Gen Z is loving it.
In Facebook’s heyday, poking was all the rage, using the feature as a way to flirt, get someone’s attention, annoy your friends or start a poke war.
Just in time for its 20th birthday, the social media company announced Tuesday that the “Poke” feature is making a comeback, improving suggestions on who to poke and making it easier to find the poking page, TechCrunch reported.
The “Poke” technically never left, it was just buried deep within a bunch of settings and virtually impossible to find. You would have to search “poke” in the Facebook search bar or somehow know the unique URL to the Poke page by heart.
At the beginning of 2024, Meta redesigned the Poke button to make it more visible, placing the button next to any name that a user searched. It’s also easier to find the Poke landing page now — you can type “poking” or “pokes” in the search bar instead of just “poke.”
Turns out, more people use a feature if they can actually find it. Meta claimed that Pokes increased 13 times since the redesign.
Meta said that over 50% of new Pokes were made by users between the ages 18 to 29, people who might’ve been too young to enjoy the true joy of poking in its height of popularity.
The young might compare a Poke to sliding into someone’s DMs.
Many users find the Poke to be extremely nostalgic, especially since it’s one of the platform’s oldest features.