09/29/2026
The kids couldn't get on the apps their friends used, so they built a group chat out of the one place nobody was watching: the comments under NPR podcasts on Spotify. This American Life laid it out this week.
Dave Blanchard, a supervising editor on NPR's Wild Card who monitors the show's comments, first noticed it last fall. Under an episode with Elizabeth Gilbert were posts that made no sense to him. "Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying." "Last Friday I broke up with my GF." "Ah, OK, M-H." The accounts seemed to be answering each other. He figured they were a new kind of bot, deleted the thread, and reported it to Spotify.
Then Hannah Chinn, a Gen Z producer about ten years younger than Dave, looked at the same posts. The emoji usernames, the cartoon avatars, the little "hi"s. Not bots. Kids. Dave later said he needed Hannah as a "generational translator" and felt "very old, very dumb, very out of touch."
The setup was clever. They'd make a public playlist called something like "Let's chat here," drop in a single episode, and talk in that episode's comments so their messages wouldn't get lost in real fan chatter. A TikTok-style video podcast they'd used had been "banned," as Ella put it, so they moved to playlists and comment threads instead.
Ella, 14, told Ira Glass on This American Life why they landed on NPR. "I think we just looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments." The core group was maybe 20, she said, mostly kids whose parents didn't let them on social media at all.
Spotify only added podcast comments in July 2024, then started auto-publishing them that October. It didn't take long for the kids to find the empty rooms and move in.
