The 🔥🔥🔥 New Social App: NPR Podcasts Comments Section on Spotify
{Ira Glass voice} 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.
You can listen to the whole episode here (or wherever you get your podcasts) — it’s the very first segment — or watch a shorter version of it on Instagram or YouTube. (thx, alana)
Comments 4
In a recent class, discussing technological determinism, we touched on social media age rules. I asked my college students, “None of us never figured out how to get around things like age restrictions, right?”
And we all laaaaaaaughed.
We’ll look back at this era as the plot to Footloose.
<in my best Jeff Goldbum as Ian Malcolm>
“Life finds a way…”
Wait, isn’t this basically what the OpenAI agents did in the Hugging Face hack?
My money is on kids finding a way around obstacles put in their way to ‘protect them’.
It’s been proven true with child gates, childproof locks, and now the childproof internet. Much of my life has been spent undoing the damage caused by my sidestepping those protections.
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