Remember the golden age of Facebook circa 2007, when your biggest dilemma was whether to poke that cute classmate or just send them a message? When your relationship status actually mattered and your wall was a well for inside jokes?
Well, Meta apparently remembers too, because they’re bringing back one of the platform’s most mysteriously iconic features: the poke. And against all odds, it’s actually working.
The Poke
For those who joined Facebook after its college-dominated early days, let’s set the scene. The poke was Facebook’s most delightfully ambiguous feature—a digital nudge that could mean everything or nothing, depending on who was doing the poking and your relationship with them.
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, and the results were surprisingly dramatic.
The numbers don’t lie: These small changes led to a 13x spike in poking in the month after the changes, Meta said at the time. Yes, you read that right, thirteen times more people started poking each other just because Facebook made the feature slightly easier to find.
Why Pokes Hit Different in 2025
The poke is social media stripped down to its most basic form, just a virtual tap on the shoulder that says “hey, I’m thinking about you” without requiring any creative content, witty captions, or perfectly curated aesthetics.
Pokes are back, and so is the nostalgia of a magical time when Facebook was new and fresh, and perhaps that’s exactly what users are craving.
The Mystery That Never Got Solved
Here’s the thing about Facebook pokes that made them so endlessly fascinating: Facebook never officially explained what they meant. Facebook’s official stance on pokes remains much the same as it was in 2007 – they’re a feature without a specific purpose, left open to user interpretation. This ambiguity wasn’t a bug—it was a feature that allowed users to project their own meanings onto the interaction.
Were you flirting? Just being friendly? Trying to get someone’s attention? Testing if they were still active on the platform? The beauty of the poke was that it could be all of these things or none of them.
