Facebook celebrates New Year's Eve with 'melancholy' firework display on people's news feed

The feature has already been described as the saddest way of celebrating New Year's Eve

(AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook has hidden a special new year easter egg in its website.

The site is letting people celebrate New Year's Eve by watching fairly dismal fireworks light up their news feed.

On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, any time anyone writes the words "Happy New Year", they'll turn blue. Whenever anyone clicks on those words, a little firework animation will play.​

Those words can be found in status updates, for instance. They'll work whether you or anyone else wrote them in the first place, and on both the website and the mobile app.

It appears that there are other phrases that will begin similar animations, but it isn't yet clear what those are. There are also other features to commemorate the new years, like special masks that you can put over your face if you go live to your friends.

The fireworks have already been criticised by tech blog Gizmodo as being "the saddest way" of commemorating the new year. It said that the lack of sound and the relatively muted appearance of the fireworks made it feel "melancholy", and that it would probably just upset people who were alone on New Year's Eve more than they were already.

The move appears to be at least in part another way for Facebook to encourage people to post about themselves on the network. The company is said to be worried that people are stopping discussing themselves and instead just receiving content – taking away valuable data used for ads – and has rolled out a range of new features that are meant to encourage people to talk about personal information instead.