Elder and mid-pack millennials may remember the epic poke wars that would happen in the early days of Facebook. No one could explain why we did it, but we had a blast annoying our friends. Over the years the feature faded into obscurity with the platform essentially burying it. After a recent UI update, the poke button has become more prevalent, and Gen Z is having a lot of fun with it.
For the past several years if you wanted to send someone a poke you had to type “poke” into the Facebook search bar. Or, if you had the URL memorized, you could access the page directly to send one. Not only was this a pain but many users who missed the early days of Facebook had no clue the feature even existed.
With Facebook’s latest UI tweak, the poke button now displays next to your friends’ names when you search for them. Shockingly, making this button more prominent led to a 13x increase in poking.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, also revealed that more than 50% of those pokes are from users in the 18-29 age group. So mostly Gen Z and younger Millennials, who weren’t old enough to mess around with the website when it launched in 2004. Meta declined to share more specifics like how many pokes are being sent daily.
With this meteoric rise in poke wars, the resurgence of mafia wars cannot be far behind. Stay safe out in cyberspace folks.
