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The early days of Facebook were pretty dumb. It did, after all, emerge from Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to create a "Hot or Not" clone as a Harvard undergrad.
Among the puzzling features that remained once Facebook opened up to everyone, however, was the "poke" option, which...let you click a button and give someone a digital "poke." Think of it as the 2008 version of liking someone's Story to get their attention.
(Credit: PCMag/Facebook)That's a thing of the past, though, right? Not exactly. As TechCrunch notes, the "poke" option is still around and interactions with it are up 13x in the last month, with 50% of those pokes coming from 18- to 29-year-olds.
It's not as prominent as it once was. Over the years, as Facebook expanded worldwide and added new features, Poke fell out of use. Unlike its ill-fated Snapchat-clone app, also named Poke, the company never got rid of it, but it wasn't easy to discover. You either had to know the URL for the dedicated Poke page, or do a search for Poke. Essentially, you had to know Poke was a thing to make use of it.
That is until Facebook made changes to resurface the feature. Not only did the company make it easier to find the Poke page, but now the Poke option can show up when searching for friends. We've seen it pop up even without searching recently, though that doesn't seem to consistently happen all the time. According to Facebook, these updates worked. "The Poke is having a moment," the company wrote on Threads this week.
Alas, one thing those users won't get to experience is the original Poke notification noise on the iOS app, which was reportedly Mark Zuckerberg saying "Poke!" You'll have to settle for the standard notification noise, and the sweet satisfaction that you used an ancient feature no one really understands.