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Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR\u2019s Wild Card<\/em> into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life<\/em>, host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them.<\/p>\n When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, \u201cWe just, like, looked for podcasts that didn\u2019t have many comments.\u201d Which, obviously, hurt Glass\u2019s feelings a bit.<\/p>\n Initially, showrunner Dave Blanchard thought the comments were a particularly odd strain of bot. \u201cIt was just like gibberish,\u201d he tells Glass in the episode. The posts were \u201cclipped, weird, incoherent,\u201d he said, and loaded with emoji and shorthand. So he deleted them. Then one of the accounts posted, \u201cso it deleted my com.\u201d So Blanchard shared screenshots of the comments in NPR\u2019s Slack.<\/p>\n Producer Hannah Chin almost immediately recognized the behavior not as bots, but as kids. \u201cI was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends,\u201d they said. \u201cI talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs,\u201d demonstrating just how resourceful kids can be when cut off from traditional social media.<\/p>\n