Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
thisamericanlife.org
thisamericanlife.org
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
But, like much of the internet, people here still use it as a "dislike" button, which is frustrating.
Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
The volunteers there maintain a bunch of functioning cool vintage equipment you can see in action and even use.
Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.
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.
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!
This one time my neighbor rang my doorbell. I answered on the intercom.
We talked for a minute and were then both puzzled. "Why did you ring the bell?"
"I didn't ring the bell. You did!"
Turns out we were both in our apartments, and an unknown third party downstairs had rung both our bells at the same time.
This was how I discovered the doorbell intercom also functions as "bus" where all apartments can talk to each other. (It also blares your conversation onto the street downstrairs, though.)
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!
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.
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.
Say more!
I'd love to read it when you're done!
http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available (https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289)
https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...
https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/
https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294
https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine
https://web.archive.org/web/20241210143429/http://sysopshub....
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
Some BBS hosts were quite sophisticated, running multiple computers and banks of modems to handle multiple user connections.
Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.
However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)
Maybe you're asking about the spotify chats though? It was challenging for me, yes. There were topics and discussions that moody kids would have that I now had a window into. It can be a bit scary as a parent to see that all without filters, but it was also an opportunity to check in with them and have conversations about it. Kids have all these feelings and conversations anyway, so it's just part of that age. My childhood was rough, so I'm just thankful it is not like that for them and they have people to talk to. As I parent of course I wish they'd come to me first, but I know I will never be their peer in that way.
I do wish I blocked short form video better, but that's more out of concern for their attention and my own aesthetic snobbery ;) I do significantly limit how much time they can spend watching it, and we all know its a "treat" akin to junk food. Sometimes they share it with me :)
I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.
In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.
I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.
Feels like a rite of passage.
Ended up making common phrases and commands in a txt file.
Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.
> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.
I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.
That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.
My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.
This is genius: (a) Treat your kid like an intelligent human being, and (b) don’t be a hypocrite.
It sounds like if you’d been my parent, maybe I would’ve respected you and taken your opinion seriously. As it is, I just quoted your anecdote (with link and attribution) in another venue where this HN thread got linked.
I will never forgive my parents for what they did to me when I was a teenager—allegedly “for my own good”. I thought I was smarter than they were. I was right.
I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.
I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.
Only applies if you regret posting it later. If it's something you want to find later, it will inevitably have bit-rotted and not been archived.
Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.
Also, it depends a lot on the kid, the relationship, etc. It was a fine line, these were important social interactions for them, but there was definitely risks to be made aware of and kids are famously bad at risk assessment.
So it was something I would monitor as best I could and check in with them on, but at some point you just have to trust them and hope any mistakes don't have overly severe consequences.
Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.
This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.
What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.
If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)
Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.
Once I burned a bunch of Linux boot cds with unreal tournament on them and took over a computer lab to have a lan party. That was fun until the lab monitor got spooked that his monitoring system showed all the computers as turned off when clearly the lab was full…
The most notable is probably cracking the admin password because I wanted to change the volume or something. (Seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time!)
The computers had all kinds of weird restrictions, including the panning being forcibly set way to the left to compensate for the school's crappy headphones -- a crime against humanity, you would surely agree, if you experienced it.
It took 30 seconds to crack, it was a short dictionary word and I remember being very disappointed with the sysadmin. But obviously I couldn't tell anyone about it...
Let me see what else... our school accounts had 200MB network storage, but this was too small for all the Portable Apps[0] I wanted to use. So I created some kind of "startup program" that downloaded and extracted them from my web server. I think it also changed the background and the Windows Theme...
https://portableapps.com/apps - still online, I see!
I think these days kids just have their own laptops though. That's no fun at all :)
That reminds me of how in zoos they put the food inside hard to open boxes so the animals don't go insane from boredom.
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.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
: DD
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
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.
My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.
First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.
I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.
Its also likely the older folk operating in HAM radio space, have a background in communication operations when HAM was a far more common communication device.
HAM is still awesome, I find it very interesting with the long distance, remote, communication challenges some people partake in.
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.
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.
It was a lot more fun than Discord, Slack, or any other dedicated chat client. With Sheets, we'd do fun little gags and bits in the spreadsheets. Everything ended up being really personalized and owned by us. Now we just send boring messages on WhatsApp. I miss the old ways.
His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.
> 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector
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...
Both formed ones ways of thinking when viewing the world.
I had my own computer in my bedroom, but the internet was only available on the family computer (256k via a PCI modem). I really really wanted the freedom to use the internet without a curfew, so I started researching how to connect two computers wirelessly... I ended up purchasing two 11mbs USB WLAN adapters for a few hundred dollars each(!) and paired them so I could share the internet connection. Wireless LAN was almost unheard of in those days, so my parents had no idea what I was up to.. although they eventually became suspicious when I stopped wanting to use the family computer yet insisting they keep it powered on.
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
Such an excellent line from a young person.
so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..
GET BACK TO WORK BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINEhttps://habitat-chronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of...
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
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.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...
TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.
PRX also funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting; this is all a somewhat incestuous, government financed form of independence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/business/media/corporatio...
This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?