Middle schoolers turned a quiet NPR podcast thread on Spotify into their group chat

One account noticed the cleanup. After the deletions it posted "so it deleted my com" under the episode ^[5], and Blanchard took screenshots of the thread to NPR's Slack ^[6].

The team read the posts as spam. "It was just like gibberish," Blanchard told Glass ^[3]. The posts were "clipped, weird, incoherent," he said, heavy on emoji and shorthand ^[4]. The users were talking to each other in a box built for listener comments. Chin had done a version of it as a kid. "I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends," Chin said. "I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs." ^[8][9]

"Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments," one of the kids told Glass when explaining how they picked Wild Card ^[10]. "I tell you, buddy," Glass responded, "I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear." ^[11] He has hosted This American Life for three decades ^[16].

TechCrunch describes a flood of comments under Wild Card's Spotify episodes last fall ^[15].

Why the kids needed a hiding place at all is the reporters' inference. The Verge says they were likely blocked from other apps and social networks ^[12]. TechCrunch says they were likely too young for social media ^[13]. Neither outlet reports which restrictions applied to these particular kids. The record does show repetition: TechCrunch reports that NPR spotted kids doing the same thing on a TED Radio Hour show the year before ^[17], so at least two NPR shows have had it happen ^[18]. What that supports is narrow: kids who want somewhere private to talk will find low-traffic comment threads, and NPR's podcast threads have been one such place twice.

The teams this affects run comments under content made for adults, with a long tail of small threads. I'd sort threads on two axes: how many distinct accounts post, and whether those accounts reply to each other. Many accounts posting once each is an ordinary comment section. Many accounts replying to each other is a community, and usually a visible one. Few accounts posting once is the dead long tail. A few accounts trading short replies on a thread nobody else touches is where the Wild Card chat sat ^[1].

In my view that last quadrant should reach a person before it reaches the delete button, because judging these posts on content alone got them deleted ^[2]. The tradeoff is review time spent on the threads with the smallest audiences, plus a harder decision once the reviewer confirms the posters are children.