Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat (thisamericanlife.org)

203 pointsby simonpure7 hours ago133 comments

xnx 6 hours ago

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.

neilellis 6 hours ago

The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.

kingkongjaffa 5 hours ago

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

throwaway27448 3 hours ago

Whoever downvoted this has no love of curiosity and doesn't belong here.

paulryanrogers 3 hours ago

Why? We weren't all taught Greek mythology in school, and there are plenty of other interests to explore thereafter

buellerbueller 3 hours ago

The downvote is optional.

paulryanrogers 3 hours ago

Sorry I guess I misread this as suggesting people should down vote the TIL comment, which struck me as gatekeeping.

true_religion 7 minutes ago

[delayed]

flyinghamster 4 hours ago

It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.

Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.

xd1936 2 hours ago

Came here to post this. Deer me later!

tantalor 2 hours ago

> I'll once again cut myself open to prove I'm not a computer

Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.

jonty 5 hours ago

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.

charlieyu1 5 hours ago

I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.

jonty 5 hours ago

These were definitely schoolkids - I translated some of the posts and the majority were gossiping about boys.

montagg 5 hours ago

Life/teenagers find a way.

gumby 2 hours ago

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!

Lammy 2 hours ago

See also: similar mid-20th-century Bell System phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beep_line

nyargh 6 hours ago

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!

barnas2 6 hours ago

> 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

This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.

bityard 6 hours ago

> everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

Avicebron 5 hours ago

The might or might not is a critical part of why the panopticon works..

esseph 5 hours ago

> I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)

Say more!

bityard an hour ago

I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.

esseph 36 minutes ago

I ran a couple of very local BBSes late beyond the hayday in the 14.4-56k timeframe. That got me into BBS software, which got me into ANSI Art, which got me into associations with warez groups, and that got me into association with various hacker collectives. Had it not been for the BBS scene I probably wouldn't work in technology today.

I'd love to read it when you're done!

walthamstow 3 hours ago

I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere

dylan604 an hour ago

Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.

someonebaggy 24 minutes ago

Usenet archives exist

madibo3156 5 hours ago

Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?

xer0x 5 hours ago

This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.

Lerc an hour ago

My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.

I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.

bullfightonmars 6 hours ago

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.

nicce 5 hours ago

Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.

Lagoon3384_SWE 5 hours ago

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.

nicce 5 hours ago

Comments are two years old, however.

Lutzb 5 hours ago

This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.

Lagoon3384_SWE 5 hours ago

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.

jahnu 3 hours ago

Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”

morkalork 3 hours ago

What's the meme about Google products and chat features?

adzm an hour ago

I actually love SoundCloud's timestamp based comments. It is pretty fun seeing someone's joyful reactions to a nice drop, beautiful vocals coming in, a brilliant lyrical phrase, etc. It's disappointing that this is not the primary mode of commenting on Spotify.

miki123211 24 minutes ago

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.

situationista 19 minutes ago

Ironic that this is the same hack AI agents seem to be using now to communicate sandbox escape tricks to one another https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/openai-agents-discu...

m4ck_ 6 hours ago

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.

aprilthird2021 6 hours ago

The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.

valorzard 6 hours ago

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

jhanschoo 5 hours ago

> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.

: DD

boredtofears 5 hours ago

My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)

chasd00 2 hours ago

my son did this in 8th grade (last year) but I think it was a google slide deck. The teach asked all the kids in class to do a slide or something and then he figured out review comments or something and they all started a group chat more or less. I can't quite remember but he was very proud of himself when he showed me hah.

settsu 38 minutes ago

Yeah I was going to comment about this: how, for years now at this point, kids have worked around district-enforced security against chat sites/apps on their school-issued Chromebooks by using various Google Workspace apps and features.

jhallenworld 6 hours ago

"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.

scottyah 6 hours ago

I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio

jhallenworld 6 hours ago

CB radio then.

cj 6 hours ago

It's the beginning of the rebirth of Web 1.0!

chorizo 3 hours ago

My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.

stackghost 3 hours ago

>This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.

At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.

I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.

encom 2 hours ago

Every generation has their Reddit mods.

RugnirViking 3 hours ago

ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"

cogman10 35 minutes ago

It's basically a walkie talkie with people who really care about enforcing HOA rules.

y-curious 5 hours ago

I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way

morkalork 3 hours ago

This is gen alpha's squinting at scrambled cable porn haha

nkrisc an hour ago

I remember lobbies in StarCraft for maps that used some best match algorithm to recreate porn images with map terrain tiles such that the image would appear in the maps mini map. It was quite a lot of work to view a single, tiny image in all the wrong colors.

Aboutplants 2 hours ago

The ingenuity of youth always makes me smile. It brings me back to my youth and the things we used to get up to, in retrospect it was a huge learning experience for me. Learning how to think outside the box, finding ways things could be utilized outside of their intended use, etc.

CM30 3 hours ago

Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.

It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.

But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.

thaack 6 hours ago

Sort of reminds me of "Party Lines" (No, not the selective ringing, multiple subscriber/line service) used by kids in the 1970s. "Party Lines" or test lines allowed multiple callers to dial in like a conference bridge. Seemed to be used extensively by kids to just chat or hang out via the telephone network.

More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w

epistasis 4 hours ago

It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.