SnarkBytes: Meta Discovers Friends Were the Point of Facebook All Along, World Pretends to Be Shocked

In an astonishing act of corporate archaeology, Meta has unearthed a long-forgotten relic known as “friendship” and dusted it off for modern use. That’s right: Facebook is reintroducing friends as a feature. This is not a joke, not a late-stage Black Mirror plot, not even a rejected Onion headline—this is just Menlo Park finally catching up with 2008.

The company officially announced it is “bringing the magic of friends back,” which raises the obvious question: where exactly did the magic go? Did it get buried beneath a thousand ragebait Reels, click-to-rage comment sections, and thirty-seven notifications reminding you to wish Cheryl from Accounting a happy birthday?

Somewhere along the way, Facebook friends stopped meaning anything. Your feed got hijacked by brand pages, group posts about air fryers, and the occasional livestream of someone’s uncle yelling at a truck rally. What once felt like a digital extension of your college dorm bulletin board turned into the world’s loudest Costco sample station: free content, but mostly crumbs.

The Return of the “Friends Tab”

Meta’s solution? A shiny “Friends Tab” that allegedly restores the ability to see posts from people you voluntarily connected with. Revolutionary! Almost like the original point of Facebook before it became a haunted marketplace of conspiracy memes and juicer ads.

Of course, there’s a catch: to find this sacred tab, you’ll have to click through a labyrinth of settings buried so deep they make Elden Ring look straightforward. Some users report it’s easier to locate Jimmy Hoffa than the “See Friends” option. Others claim they had to reset their password, answer a CAPTCHA about stoplights, and sacrifice a FarmVille cow to gain access.

But don’t worry, Meta assures us this is “just the beginning.” The Friends Tab is only Phase One of a broader social media nostalgia project. Later this year, the company promises even more “OG experiences.” Translation: dust off your pokes, brace yourself for a return to FarmVille addiction, and get ready for a user interface so aggressively spartan it could double as a DMV kiosk.

Why Meta Needs Friends (Literally)

Let’s be real: this isn’t about rekindling authentic human connection. This is about retention metrics. Meta is in a knife fight for attention with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and a generation that thinks “posting to Facebook” is something their parents do right before checking Zillow.

The platform has already thrown every trick in the algorithmic playbook—Reels, Groups, Pages, Marketplace, and whatever that metaverse thing was supposed to be. None of it stuck. Now, like a sitcom that ran out of plotlines, Facebook is going for the “nostalgia reboot.” Think of it as the Fuller House of social media: familiar characters, less charm, and way too many ads.

Still, this isn’t the worst idea. People do, in fact, miss seeing posts from their actual friends on Facebook. Remember when you’d post a photo and ten people you knew in real life actually saw it? Remember comments that weren’t bots selling crypto? If Meta can deliver even a sliver of that experience again, users might forgive them for turning News Feed into an infinite scroll of rage-optimized content.

The Future: Retro Is the New Innovation

Meta’s marketing team says “friends are the core of our vision for Facebook.” Which is bold, considering they had to re-announce this as if it were new. It’s like Starbucks holding a press conference to say, “Big news: we’re bringing coffee back.”

What’s next on the product roadmap? A full regression to 2006:

• Pokes: Nothing says “digital intimacy” like a pixelated jab.
• FarmVille: Because nothing builds community like nagging your friends to water your virtual corn.
• Status Updates in the Third Person: “Alex is… trying to remember why they logged on.”
• The Wall: The original proto-feed where inside jokes and vague lyrics lived in harmony.

And let’s be honest—this is exactly the kind of retro social media gimmick that might work. TikTok may own the youth, but Millennials are nostalgic suckers. If Meta leans in, we could see an actual Facebook revival, one “it’s complicated” relationship status at a time.

A Black Mirror Episode We Didn’t Ask For

There’s something deeply Black Mirror-esque about this announcement. Imagine a trillion-dollar company proudly presenting the radical concept of “friends” like it’s a moon landing. In an era of AI-generated influencers, algorithmic doomscrolling, and social platforms that feel more like slot machines than communities, maybe “friends” really are the most disruptive feature left.

Of course, this begs the question: if Meta just rediscovered friends, what else is hiding in their product backlog? “Events” that actually show up? “Groups” that aren’t filled with spam bots? A “like” button that means something again?

Until then, we’ll take the Friends Tab and hope it doesn’t come bundled with 47 new privacy settings we’ll never understand.

Conclusion: Somewhere, Tom From MySpace Is Laughing

As Facebook desperately attempts to resurrect its glory days, there’s one man sipping a margarita with a satisfied grin: Tom from MySpace. While Meta spends billions trying to reinvent friendship, Tom is probably still everyone’s first friend and hasn’t had to sit through a single quarterly earnings call.

So yes, Meta is bringing friends back to Facebook. Not the kind that send you Venmo requests, not the kind that flood your DMs with pyramid schemes, but the original kind—people you actually know, whose lives you might actually care about.

It’s equal parts depressing and hilarious that this counts as innovation in 2025. But hey, if Zuckerberg really wants to win back users, he should just bring back the clean timeline, poke battles, and status updates in Comic Sans. Then maybe—just maybe—Facebook will feel like friends again.