Somewhere between “poke wars” and virtual cupcakes, Facebook turned our teenage awkwardness into product features - and honestly, we let it.

1. The Poke: Prehistoric DM Thirst 

Before the smooth “DM slide,” there was the poke - an aggressively vague button whose entire job was to annoy, flirt, or confuse, depending on your damage that week. You’d log in, see “So-and-so poked you,” and spend 20 minutes overthinking whether to poke back or pretend it never happened.

Facebook never officially defined it - by design. A 2007 explanation literally said they wanted a feature “without any specific purpose,” so people could decide what it meant. Translation: they built an ambiguity machine and watched us crumble. And now, in a plot twist nobody asked for, Meta has quietly revived Pokes for Gen Z nostalgia bait.

2. Superpoke & Throwing Sheep at People 

If the standard poke was subtle chaos, Superpoke was pure unhinged energy. Through a third‑party app, you could “throw a sheep,” “tickle,” or “ninja-kick” your friends.There was an entire era when people genuinely spent afternoons spamming each other with virtual actions instead of replying to messages like normal humans. No context. No conversation. Just, “X has thrown a sheep at you.” Looking back, it feels like the prototype for today’s reaction memes - just clunkier and somehow more embarrassing.

3. Top Friends: Public Ranking of Your Trauma 

Long before Instagram “Close Friends,” Facebook let you curate a Top Friends list, very MySpace‑style. Your besties’ faces would sit proudly at the top of your profile, like a digital seating chart for your emotional politics.

Fallout was brutal. One demotion and college hostels, school corridors, even coaching classes were full of “Why am I not in your Top 8 anymore?” drama. In hindsight, it was gamified friendship anxiety - Facebook literally productized insecurity and we played along.

4. Gifts: Virtual Cupcakes and Teddy Bears

Yes, there was a time when people genuinely sent each other virtual cupcakes on Facebook. The Gifts feature lets you buy little icons - teddy bears, mugs, cakes - and attach a message for birthdays or random affection pings.

It cost real money in some phases, for items that existed only as tiny pixels on someone’s profile. The cringe isn’t just the feature; it’s the realization that we were proudly flexing “I bought you a cartoon coffee cup” as a love language. Today’s equivalents - emojis, stickers, UPI ₹11 - feel downright evolved by comparison.

5. The Ticker: Legalized Low-Keyx Stalking 

In 2011, Facebook launched the Ticker, a real‑time activity stream on the right side of your screen that showed every like, comment, and add‑friend move your contacts made. If News Feed was general gossip, Ticker was CCTV.People hated it; it turned casual scrolling into forensic tracking of who stalked whose ex or liked which cringe page at 2 a.m. The feature was quietly killed off around 2017, no big farewell post, like Facebook itself knew it had gone a bit too Black Mirror.

Twenty‑two years in, the platform looks sleeker, safer, more “grown‑up.” But buried under Reels and algorithmic feeds are these deeply awkward relics - proof that social media didn’t just document our adolescence, it engineered half of it.