Facebook is bringing back iconic feature for the first time in 21 years to attract young people
Facebook is bringing back an iconic feature for the first time in 21 years.
The change-up is said to be made in an attempt to attract young people back onto the platform.
Over two decades since it was first launched, the Meta site is bringing back an old classic.
Once more, you will be able to ‘poke’ your friends as the feature is being revamped.
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In a post explaining the update, Facebook said: “Pokes never really left but they’re making a comeback in a major way. Now you can see who poked you and find other friends to poke.
“See your poke-count with friends grow each time you poke each other.”
The social media giant added that people will also have the ability to dismiss unwanted pokes.
Last year, Facebook claimed that poke was ‘having a moment’ after it reported that there had been a 13 times surge in the feature’s usage.
While Facebook continues to take top place as the most popular social media platform in the world, it has struggled to gain new users in recent times.
Now, it seems that Mark Zuckerberg has his sights set on a younger audience, hoping to lure gen z over from other apps such as TikTok and Snapchat and back onto his OG platform.
Earlier this year, the mogul made an appearance on the Colin and Samir podcast where Zuckerberg talked about his decision to bring back a different feature to Facebook - the ‘Friends’ tab.
He said: “This is phase one of bringing back OG Facebook. 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.
“I actually think that there's this whole opportunity that I think is going to be pretty fun to to go after and build, which is just to kind of go one-by-one and build up a a bunch of these things that used to be these joyful experiences that people had as part of Facebook that just kind of don't exist on the internet today.”
Others have reacted to the news over the poke button, with one user saying on Reddit: “It was fun with friends back in the olden days. Now who even uses fb?”
Another said: “My mom's going to love that.”
And a third person added: “Zuckerberg desperately needs a product win, it seems.”