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Facebook's new Did You Know feature asks you to answer icebreaker questions

Facebook's new Did You Know feature asks you to answer icebreaker questions

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And some of them are kind of strange

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Facebook “did you know” question
Image: Facebook

Facebook has started to include personality question prompts that appear on users’ profile pages, as spotted by TechCrunch. The questions, which are generally cutesy in nature, can be found in the lower left of desktop profiles as “Did You Know,” or just above your most recent status on mobile as “Fun Facts.”

Posited as a way to share an icebreaker about yourself, there’s the ability to cycle through several different prompts until you land on one you’d like to answer. If you choose to answer one, it will be posted as a text status with a colored background, under new category “Answer a Question.”

Facebook’s new “Answer a Question” feature
Image: Facebook

Most of the questions that are presented are pretty straightforward, like “If I could pick any gift to receive today, I’d pick...” while others are simply weird. Here are some of the prompts I was given when cycling through suggested queries:

  • If I could choose to be an amazing painter or a brilliant mathematician, I’d rather be...
  • The best thing about the internet is...
  • If I could bring anyone back to life, I would bring back...
  • The best dance move of all time is...
  • If I had to be locked for a week in a room that was completely dark or completely bright I’d rather...

Or, tell your friends if you would rather be a benevolent or soul-crushing leader:

As TechCrunch notes, these types of questions feel evocative of tbh, an iOS app that Facebook recently acquired. The app, which launched in August, allows you to send prewritten compliments to friends based off of prompts like “who has the best smile?” Facebook said in a statement to The Verge that it was interested in the way tbh was building community using polling and messaging, an intersection Facebook itself has recently been delving into very literally with Polls.

The addition of these personality quiz statuses could be a response to the fact that people are sharing fewer personal updates on Facebook than they used to. According to The Information, these types of updates have slowed as feeds become more populated by boosted brand posts, shared videos and news, and memes.