I still remember my first poke from a boy. I was 19 years old and in my third term of university; the young man in question and I had worked a couple of pub shifts together. We’d exchanged flirty quips and meaningful looks along the bar. There was a vibe. Then, one evening, he poked me.
Ugh, not like that. Get your mind out of the gutter, please. No, I was minding my own business, clicking through a Facebook album of around a thousand identikit drunken photos from a night out on my PC, when those three little game-changing words popped up on my screen: “Adam poked you.”
Wahhh! It felt like I’d been directly plugged into an electric current, skin tingling and hairs standing on end just as much as if I’d been physically touched. His action was somehow more provocative than a message, more… intimate than just tagging me in a post. He’d actually poked me. It had to mean something.
If you’re under the age of 30, you may well have never experienced the thrill of a good poking. Now, two decades after the feature was first introduced (good Lord I feel old), Meta’s revamping it in a bid to attract younger users with a shot of nostalgia for a time they never actually lived through. “Pokes never really left but they’re making a comeback in a major way,” reads a Facebook post describing plans to revive and update this former staple of the platform. “Now you can see who poked you and find other friends to poke.”
Users will be able to view their “pokes-count” with friends on a dedicated page, apparently, where they’ll be alerted to each new poke they receive. It follows an unexpected popularity boost last year; Facebook described the poke as “having a moment” after registering a spike in usage.
It’s all part of a wider plan to try to recapture “OG Facebook”, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said on a podcast in March: “A lot of the fun and useful parts of the original experience, we just sort of didn’t focus as much on. And not only did we not focus on them as much, but… I realised no one else actually recreated a lot of these things that used to be pretty magical about Facebook either.”
He went on to describe that earlier version of Facebook as offering “these joyful experiences” that “just kind of don’t exist on the internet today”.
And, as much as one might be inclined to roll their eyes at adjectives like “magical” and “joyful” being applied to the now-$15bn corporation, he’s not actually wrong. It’s hard to imagine if you’ve grown up with social media as it is now – a monstrous behemoth of a “distractification” industry designed purely to steal every possible sliver of your time – but in its humble beginnings, Facebook was fun.
Following on from early rivals MySpace and Bebo, the platform first entered the UK in 2005, the same year I started university, and was only initially available to students – you had to have a uni email address to join. Way back before insane algorithms, rage-bait, influencers and echo chambers existed, it truly was a social network. You followed your friends, and friends of friends, and only saw their posts. You logged on primarily to view the interminable photos of your mates in various states of inebriation from the night before and, crucially, to stalk that fit guy you met on the troublingly sticky dancefloor of the student union. This was back when Facebook relationship statuses meant everything (“it’s complicated” – so intriguing!) and the site had the potential to connect you with your next sexual conquest or, more realistically, rejection.
It was an exciting time, and the poke made it even more so. Pre-FB, you’d have seen that boy from your seminar smouldering in the library and simply lusted from afar. Now, you could playfully let him know you were interested – all without having to think up an excruciating opening gambit or even say “hello”. If he responded online, maybe he was interested too. If he ignored it, no real harm done – you could simply pretend it never happened, or say you went round poking everyone while pissed. Rejection averted.
But that was the thing that made the OG Facebook genuinely “magical” – online interactions were merely a jumping off point for irl ones. This new tool enabled you to connect so that you might get a conversation going the next time you bumped into them in halls or happened to be out at the same indie club night. The exhilaration was bound up in the real-world potential that this digital realm had unlocked.
Harking back to the ‘good old days’ of Facebook is like trying to turn back the clock to a completely different era
I can see why Zuckerberg would be desperate to invoke FB’s original mojo. While it remains the world’s most-used social media site, the average age of the most active users has climbed since its inception as a tool specifically geared towards bright young things. Colloquially known as the “old person’s platform”, Facebook has seen an increase in engagement among the 55+ demographic, who often spend more time on there than any other cohort. Anecdotally, I know very few millennials who use it at all these days, let alone regularly. Instagram and WhatsApp have largely taken its place, while TikTok and Snapchat have cornered the Gen Z market (the less said about Twitter the better at this point).
And yet harking back to the “good old days” of Facebook is like trying to turn back the clock to a completely different era – a simpler, more innocent time of the internet when it felt full of hope and possibility. When it really did enable communities to form, online friendships to be forged and, yes, gentle flirting to take place at the touch of an icon of a pointing index finger. That world no longer exists. Facebook knows that – after all, the platform was instrumental in its destruction, replacing social “networking” with social “media” and building a business model whose role is not to connect people but to keep them separate, alone and silently scrolling a screen for hours on end. It has no interest in creating an environment in which an interaction might lead to you putting down your phone, leaving the house, and meeting up with someone new – someone who might take that most precious commodity of all: your attention.
Bring back all the Noughties features you like, but never again will those three little words set a young woman’s heart racing. Sorry, Facebook – the poke is officially broke.
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