Facebook is trying to make ‘pokes’ happen again

Summary

Technically, the poke never really left Facebook. The classic feature from Facebook’s early days lets users get a friend’s attention with a virtual nudge of sorts. While the poke fell out of use ages ago, the company has more recently seen an uptick in its use among younger users, which has now prompted it to make the poke a more central part of the Facebook experience. Now users are able to poke their friends from a new, dedicated button directly on their Facebook profile, which will alert the poke’s recipient through their notifications. In addition, Facebook users can see who poked them and find friends to poke at facebook.com/pokes. On this page, users will be able to track their “poke count” with friends, which grows every time they poke each other. They can also dismiss pokes if they don’t want to reciprocate. Image Credits:Meta (screenshot) (opens in a new window) The poke-tracking feature is largely designed to appeal to younger users who have grown up with gamification elements built into their social apps, like Snapchat and TikTok Streaks. These features ostensibly help friends keep track of those they message most, but streaks have come under regulatory scrutiny and have even led to lawsuits because of their addictive nature, as they keep kids hooked on the apps. By highlighting poke counts and making the poke more prominent on Facebook, Meta wants to create a similar engagement mechanism. As users increase their poke counts with a friend, different icons will appear next to the friend’s name, like a fire emoji or “100,” among others. This isn’t the first time in recent months that Facebook has tried to revive the poke. In March 2024, the company said it had made it easier for users to find the poking page via search and would make it easier to poke a friend after searching for them. These small changes led to a 13x spike in poking in the month after the changes, Meta said at the time. As for why you’d want to poke someone, that’s up to users to decide. F...