Ha! nicely done kids. lol. Poor Ira Glass
Kottke: On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript:
And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of any of them. They’re just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like— it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it’s a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
They tracked down one of the participants and interviewed her:
Ira Glass: And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?
Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.
Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.
Ella: Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.
Ira Glass: I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.
Dave Blanchard, a supervising editor on NPR's Wild Card who monitors the show's comments, first noticed it last fall. Under an episode with Elizabeth Gilbert were posts that made no sense to him. "Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying." "Last Friday I broke up with my GF." "Ah, OK, M-H." The accounts seemed to be answering each other. He figured they were a new kind of bot, deleted the thread, and reported it to Spotify.
Then Hannah Chinn, a Gen Z producer about ten years younger than Dave, looked at the same posts. The emoji usernames, the cartoon avatars, the little "hi"s. Not bots. Kids. Dave later said he needed Hannah as a "generational translator" and felt "very old, very dumb, very out of touch."
The setup was clever. They'd make a public playlist called something like "Let's chat here," drop in a single episode, and talk in that episode's comments so their messages wouldn't get lost in real fan chatter. A TikTok-style video podcast they'd used had been "banned," as Ella put it, so they moved to playlists and comment threads instead.