The Facebook “Poke” is back…though was it really ever in? Young folks — you know, Gen Z and the like — are apparently using the Poke more than ever.
Last week, Facebook said it had seen a 13x spike in Pokes over the last month.
The oft-forgotten feature on the oft-forgotten social media site is having a moment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you young folks are flocking to Facebook. It seems like it’s more of a curiosity. Multiple outlets reported that the rise in Pokes was due to a design change that put the feature more front-and-center. Basically if you search for pokes or poking, it’s easier to bring up a person’s Poke page.
“We know poking has strong network effects, but we didn’t expect poking to grow so rapidly after these changes,” a spokesperson for Meta told NBC News. “We didn’t announce anything about poking at the time either.”
In case you forgot, Poking is literally just reminding someone you exist. You Poke them, they get a notification. It was an early feature back when Facebook was king. There’s definitely a sense of nostalgia for some users of that time. But young people are apparently poking as well. Meta said more than 50 percent of the new Pokers were done by users aged 18 to 29, Business Insider reported. So it’s not just Olds who used to actually use Facebook.
Now that we’re all apparently Poking again, I have a modest proposal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s time to bring Myspace back.