Meta is currently juggling a number of priorities that founder Mark Zuckerberg likely never envisioned during the early days of Facebook. The company has dramatically shifted its focus from social networking to building the metaverse and, more recently, to leading the charge in artificial intelligence. Yet, amidst all these futuristic endeavors, one of its oldest and most ambiguous features has not only survived the test of time but is now receiving a significant update. This feature is, of course, the iconic Facebook poke.
The company is attempting to breathe new life into this storied function by making it easier to find. According to a post on its Instagram channel, Meta is adding the poke feature back to user profiles within the Facebook mobile app. Furthermore, the company has created a dedicated hub for all poke-related activity. Users can now visit facebook.com/pokes to track every poke exchanged with their friends.
The update seems to introduce a new gamified element to the interaction, reminiscent of Snapchat streaks. Different emojis now appear next to a friend’s name based on the number of pokes that have been sent back and forth, potentially encouraging more frequent use.
For those who may not have been on Facebook in its infancy, the poke was a foundational, if perplexing, feature of the early social network. At a time when the platform offered limited ways to interact, the poke existed as a simple, one-click gesture with no explicit purpose. Its meaning was entirely open to interpretation, often landing somewhere on a spectrum between a creepy intrusion and a flirtatious hello. As Meta itself acknowledged, the poke never truly disappeared, but it was gradually buried deep within the site’s interface, largely forgotten by the vast majority of its users.
For reasons that remain unclear, Meta has been trying to engineer a poke comeback for some time. The company claimed last year that the feature was experiencing a resurgence, reporting a thirteen-fold increase in pokes after it began surfacing the option in the Facebook search bar. This latest effort to integrate poking directly into profiles suggests a renewed push to build momentum around the feature, likely aimed at attracting a new, younger demographic.
This revival strategy aligns with comments made by Zuckerberg earlier this year, where he expressed a desire to bring back more original, or OG, Facebook features. He specifically mentioned prioritizing content from a user’s actual friends over algorithmically-selected content from pages. The poke is arguably the most OG feature of them all, a digital artifact from a simpler time on the internet.
Meta has also been on a multi-year quest to make its flagship platform appealing again to young adults, a demographic that has increasingly migrated to competitors like TikTok and Snapchat. The company may see the revamped, gamified poke as a way to tap into the same psychology that drives users to maintain lengthy Snapchat streaks, turning a pointless nudge into a persistent inside joke between friends. In the ever-evolving landscape of social media, Meta is betting that a little piece of the past might just be the key to its future.
