Facebook poke is a feature to say hello or get someone’s attention, but it can also have alternative meanings such as determining sexual interest or playing a tag game. It’s best not to use it on everyone and ignoring a poke is acceptable.
Facebook poke is a feature on the Facebook homepage and has a number of potential meanings. An option located on the right side of the page allows people to “hit” someone else with a mouse click or touch screen tap. When a user chooses to poke someone, the chosen person receives a message who has been poked and by whom. There’s also an option with any new poke to be countered. For many, this is just a way to say hello, but other meanings have been suggested that are worth exploring.
Facebook’s information pages explain poking as a way to say hello or to get someone’s attention. It can also be a mutual greeting, especially when a person has been hit and chooses to respond. Of course, this action is quicker than writing on someone’s wall, and depending on your privacy settings, it may be possible to target people who aren’t currently friends. Often, this feature is limited to people in a network of friends, but privacy settings are subject to rapid change on this social platform.
A few alternative meanings to the Facebook poke have been suggested. People might primarily use this feature to determine the level of someone else’s sexual interest, for example, and a mutual poke might lead to a real or virtual encounter with another like-minded person. Of course, not everyone uses it, and people should be fairly certain that both people will understand any sexual connotations of a poke before proceeding to chat and floor a friend with too much private information.
Another explanation is that a poke is meant to be mildly, moderately, or very mischievous. When people have huge networks of friends, replying to pokes can get annoying, and it’s much more content that can get in the way of reading each other’s posts. Luckily, people don’t have to respond in any way, but someone who keeps poking repeatedly may not be friends or hiding.
A Facebook poke can also be used in a network of friends to play a tag version. People hit each other until the hit goes back to the initiator of a game. Again, varying levels of participation and interest on the network can cause the game to crash quickly if one person is unresponsive.
Ultimately, the poke is typically what people make of it: mostly a hello, and occasionally more meaningful. It’s best if people don’t use this option on everyone they know because it can seem annoying, and it’s usually perfectly fine to ignore a poke because it’s meant to be a very short form of communication. In most cases, this is the equivalent of a tap on the shoulder.
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