Hug of Pokes
Remember Facebook pokes from back in the day? Yeah, me neither. Here's a twist: every time you click the button above, I get a notification on my phone. No login required.
Drew some inspiration from the Hacker News Hug of Death (HN) article and wanted to try it out myself, seeing what it would take to implement and code it.
It's a curious experiment to see what happens. May regret it if this gets too popular, or if the bots and AI scrapers discover it and start auto-poking.
Poke Stats
Summary
| Total Pokes: | 2182 |
|---|---|
| Unique Pokers: | 25 |
| Today's Pokes: | 0 |
Daily Activity (Last Month)
| Date | Pokes | Unique |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-04-20 | 11 | 2 |
| 2025-04-21 | 1101 | 16 |
| 2025-04-22 | 996 | 6 |
| 2025-04-23 | 73 | 3 |
| 2025-05-12 | 1 | 1 |
How It Works
When you click the poke button, three things happen:
- Some confetti happens.
- A request is sent to the server to send notifications.
- My phone buzzes with a notification that says "Someone just poked you!"
Picked a sound that wasn't too distracting, one that could be slept through and could be considered background noise.
Limits
Limited by the API to 10k Android notifications per month. To work around and prevent going over the notification limit per month: Notifications are queued in a 5 minute window, where the first one will fire immediately, and following ones will be grouped and delayed for 5 minutes.