NPR Staffer Mistook Kids' Secret Spotify Chat for Bots
Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
When Dave Blanchard, a producer at NPR's Wild Card, saw gibberish comments on a Spotify podcast episode, he assumed they were bots and deleted them. But a younger colleague, Hannah Chinn, recognized the behavior: kids were using the comments as a secret group chat. They created playlists named 'chat here' and flocked to low-traffic NPR shows to avoid detection. One 14-year-old explained they chose NPR because it didn't seem popular. The story reveals how Gen Alpha repurposes platforms in unexpected ways.
I literally needed Hannah to be my generational translator.
- xnx
The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
- jonty
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
- miki123211
Anything on the internet will eventually be turned into a childrens' chatroom.
Do you allow them acces to your school's website? Guess what's under one of these forgotten posts about a singing competition from 2012. Do you let them access some math exercise platform? Does it allow sending people invitations to work together and also let you set group names? That's a chatroom right there.
I think the coolest one I've heard about is prison tablets that didn't restrict access to WiFi settings, so people would set up personal hotspots and use access point SSIDs for communication between cells.
- gumby
French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!
The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!
- nyargh
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
- bullfightonmars
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
- m4ck_
Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.
- valorzard
Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework