Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

paulajohnson

Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

adaml_623

"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person." Such an excellent line from a young person.

sublinear

> Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny. Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people? I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.

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.

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.

Tepix

First the chat agents, now the kids!

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!

TuringNYC

Reminds me of the old slashdot post from 25yrs ago that people still chat on

ok123456

Just like sid=trolltalk on Slashdot.

tamimio

These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.

pteraspidomorph

I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?

micromacrofoot

I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc

hyperlinerapp

Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.

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

jhallenworld

"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.

statenjason

Canva is a group chat for students at the local school. The share function of projects as “channels”, comments for text, and slides a surface for sharing media.

neilellis

Well now all the agents will have this in their training data, so expect them to come calling in the future :-) :-)

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.

thaack

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

alexjplant

I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.