In Facebook’s early Wild West days, the Poke button was one of the few ways to communicate on the social media platform — whether it was to flirt with a crush or engage in Poke wars with friends (you had to be there). Meta recently resurfaced the feature with a design update, and to no one’s surprise, Gen Z is having fun with it.
As Business Insider and TechCrunch point out (pun intended), the UI tweak started rolling out at the top of this year, allowing users to Poke a friend after searching for them. This resulted in a 13x surge in Pokes, Meta has revealed, though the company declined to share more specific data.
More than 50% of those new Pokes are from users in the 18-29 age group, or Zoomers and young millennials who were too young to have Facebook when it first launched in 2004.
As Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos previously reported, the Poke never really went away — but it was only possible to access it by searching for “poke” on Facebook or going directly to the Pokes page.
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Now, it’s easier to find the Poke button and have fun with — or more likely, creep out — folks that you haven’t talked to in a while or perhaps, bring back some nostalgia for those of us who were on Facebook in the mid-2000s.
