The Facebook poke was once considered to be a creepy flirting tool, but it seems to have evolved into a simple and polite way to say hello to an old acquaintance.
When I went to test my own Facebook friends' reactions to the poke over a decade after it was first introduced, it was surprising to learn the poke was viewed exactly how Mark Zuckerberg wanted users to see it 11 years ago.
But let's back up.
When a little website called TheFacebook.com launched in 2004, there were very few bells and whistles. But there was one very beloved feature — a button to "Poke" other users.
The poke didn't come with any explanation or rules. Zuckerberg, then 23, said he just wanted to make something with no real purpose. For years, Facebook as a company did not explain what poking implied (see this vague interpretation from its FAQ page in 2007), and so it was up to the first generation of the network's users to define the poke.
Now thanks to the advent of Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, and Twitter, there are so many ways to tell people you approve of their online activity — with "likes" and "faves" and "hearts" — leaving the poke to fade into the background.
But that doesn't mean people have stopped talking about it.
Searching for combinations of the words "Facebook" and "Poke" on Twitter (the internet's cafeteria) yields a surprising number of recent results.
—k8med$ (@gr8dak8) July 14, 2015
—jonathan joestar (@slothnick) July 31, 2015
—Mallory Glenn (@mal_glenn) July 14, 2015
—Brandi Helton (@LoveBranddi) July 24, 2015
—Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 31, 2015
This might have been true for the earliest generation of Facebookers. When I asked one close friend what she remembered about the Facebook poke, she immediately responded "poke wars."
"Sometimes you would log in to Facebook, poke everyone [back and forth] for a while, and then continue with the rest of your day," she recalled. From my own personal experience, "poke wars" were like a personal battle of wills, each person trying to have the last poke before signing off.
In 2007, the poke had grown to be associated with a lighthearted flirt. Slate's Emily Yoffe wrote that the poke was "a form of Facebook communication for the commitment-phobe who doesn't want to rush into friendship." Again, friendship seemed to be the major underlying purpose behind the innocent website feature.
But Yoffe's definition clashes with a 2006 op-ed article from Brown University, which affiliated the poke with such a high level of sexual tension that it led two seniors to have an "awkward" one-night stand. Then there was this Mashable post, which said a poke between two people in 2007 led to their marriage in 2014.
It seemed as if Facebook’s poke had evolved into a virtual pickup line. An old website called PickUpArtistMindset wrote in a 2008 post called "How to Pick Up Girls on Facebook" that "most of the work to succeeding on Facebook is before you poke her. She will receive the poke, look at your pictures, and then if she likes them she will poke back. After that simply add her as a friend and get ready to message her." How sweet.
It wasn't just sleazy pick-up artists either. In a guide for clueless moms, Good Housekeeping created a "Facebook Cheat Sheet" to help them understand teen slang. The poke, the magazine said, was reserved typically for flirting.
But the poke's brief tenure as the pick-up tool du jour had become deplored by 2009. "Can someone please tell me WTF is up with guys on Facebook poking you?" Glamour writer Shallon Lester wrote in 2009. "I have never once responded to a poke — and don't even get me started on whatever the hell a 'super poke' is, gag — and I urge you girls to do the same."
College Candy agreed, writing in a 2009 Facebook etiquette guide that, "Poking is not a form of flirtation."
By 2010, it seemed to be widely understood that the poke was a creepy (and lazy!) way to tell someone you would like to sleep with them. A 2010 CNN article titled "It's time to reclaim the Facebook Poke" described a survey of a bunch of people about their personal definition of the poke. Their findings? The poke was "a totally weak move."
"As one of those surveyed said: 'It's Facebook's creepy tool of socially acceptable sexual molestation,'" CNN said. Even five years ago, there were already so many other acceptable ways to flirt online that using the poke feature seemed outdated, bizarre, and alarming.
As if in response to the public's distaste for the poke, in 2011, Facebook's major redesign hid the button so that it no longer showed up on a friend's profile. If you really, really wanted to poke someone, you would have to go digging through Facebook. It now lives buried on your News Feed under the Apps section. It even prompted Mashable's Pete Cashmore to call for the death of the poke.
But it's four years later, and the poke at least remains a part of the public lexicon. Whether it's teens and tweens discovering the joys of the poke war today or people simply wondering why anyone would bother poking anymore, if Twitter is to be believed, at least some of us are still talking about it.
When I asked what the usage for the poke looked like these days, a Facebook representative told Tech Insider the company didn't keep track of that data. So I took matters into my own hands and poked numerous people whom I have varying degrees of relationships with on Facebook — from an eighth-grade math teacher to my current roommate — to see what the response from poke would be.
If the truly accepted definition was the poke was now "creepy," I was surprised to see everyone I poked (including an old teacher) all poked me back — though to be fair, they were a bit confused.
"I cannot remember the last time someone poked me," my old math teacher mused. "Probably years ago." He didn't think anything of it.
This doesn't mean the poke is safe from oblivion or even that it could be making a comeback. But there does seem be a vestige of the old power the poke once held over its early users nine years ago: Even in 2015 if a friend pokes you, it's only polite to poke them back to say "hi."
