NPR's comment section was mistaken for bots — it was actually a group of middle schoolers
NPR staff saw a flood of gibberish in the comments and their first instinct was bots, so they reported it; a younger colleague recognized it as kids whose parents had blocked social media, using a Spotify comment section as a group chat.
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The gibberish comments weren't bots, they were kids
Dave Blanchard saw a sudden flood of incomprehensible messages in the Wild Card comment section on Spotify, and his first instinct was bots, so he reported them to Spotify and had the posts deleted. But Hannah Chin, a colleague at NPR ten years younger, opened the screenshots and immediately reached the opposite conclusion: these are kids. Her evidence was the display names with emoji that require a special character generator to type, the unfamiliar cartoon avatars, and the speech pattern of short back-and-forth lines with lots of exclamation points. Dave wasn't buying it at first, and replied, "That's an interesting theory."
— Hannah Chin / Dave BlanchardUsing playlists as a group-chat doorway
Hannah kept digging and found how the kids operated: one kid creates a public playlist called Let's Chat Here or New Chat with just one podcast episode in it; other kids see the playlist, click into that episode, and chat in the comments. They also post Google Forms as little quizzes, writing "only cool people can fill this out." Hannah said bots don't go post Google Forms, but Gen Alpha does, the same way her generation made their own personality quizzes on UQuiz or BuzzFeed. That was the detail that convinced Dave.
— Hannah ChinThey picked NPR because the comments were empty
The show reached out to several commenters, and only one, a 14-year-old girl named Ella, agreed to be interviewed; she did the interview from the car while her father drove. Ella said the core group is about 20 kids, many of them in drama club, mostly girls, with strict parents who don't let them use regular social media. They first chatted in the comment section of a podcast that played TikTok videos, and after that podcast got shut down, the kids started using playlists to relocate. Asked why they chose NPR shows, Ella said: we look for podcasts that don't have many comments, so we don't get mixed up in other people's comments.
— EllaDave needed a generational translator
After learning the truth, Dave said he felt guilty for reporting them, and also felt old. He said, "I literally needed Hannah to be my generational translator," and that this made him acutely aware of his age and how out of date he was. Ella said she was sure that one day she too would be as completely lost as Dave. The show puts this segment at the top, as the entry point to the whole episode's "intergenerational space travel" theme.
— Dave BlanchardThe wedding toast was a poem nobody understood
At 18, Courtney read a poem she wrote at her mother's second wedding, and her mother held it against her for thirty years. The poem opens with the mother walking in habitual darkness, every breath like her last, moves to the mother standing by the counter smoking, and then turns at the end to "you found roots, you found a soul worth worshipping." The mother said that on the wedding day she only heard the negative first half and never heard the kindness at the end; after rereading it, Courtney admitted that presenting a bride with such a dark picture on her wedding day would indeed make it hard to hear the good part.
— Courtney / LindaThe body knew the marriage was wrong first
Two days after the wedding, the 49-year-old mother suffered a massive stroke. Courtney offers a theory: her mother's body, not her mind, had known all along that the marriage was a mistake. The mother agreed, saying she knew when she was buying the wedding dress, that she wasn't all that happy then, that she "anticipated this awfulness ahead of time," sensing it in every fiber. This exchange turns all the earlier arguing about the wedding toast into a question about why her mother didn't listen to her intuition back then.
— Linda / CourtneyOnly kicking out the stepfather repaired mother and daughter
Last October, the mother fell in the kitchen Mr. X designed and broke her back; Mr. X was too drunk to help, and only handed her the phone hours later so she could call an ambulance herself. The mother was hospitalized for months and gave Courtney power of attorney to go to court and have Mr. X removed. Courtney said it was the hardest thing she has ever done, but they won. The mother said it was precisely because Courtney spent so much time here for that, that she realized how much her daughter cared about her. Mr. X drove them apart, and getting rid of him pulled them back together.
— Courtney / LindaThe mother says braiding shouldn't be a doorway to toughness
Every morning Myra Flynn locks horns with her six-year-old daughter Avalon over braiding, and she blurted out "sometimes the things we need aren't comfortable," then immediately realized those were her own mother's words. She called her mother, Martha Mathis, expecting support, but her mother said: braiding shouldn't be used as a doorway to make a child tough, because it carries too many racial and gender meanings; and besides, six-year-old Avalon is already the toughest little girl there is. Her mother's advice was to let Avalon handle a small section of hair herself, because "she'll be gentle with herself."
— Martha Mathis / Myra FlynnIn their own words · checked verbatim
And it was just, like, gibberish. Like, I just, there was, there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of any of them.
Dave Blanchard1:01
I think we just like look for podcasts that didn't have many comments.
Ella9:07
I literally needed Hannah to be my generational translator.
Dave Blanchard11:08
I do believe that I anticipated this awfulness ahead of time.
Linda31:52
Mr. X drove us apart. And kicking him out is what brought us back together.
Linda40:08
No, I wouldn't use hair as a gateway to toughen up because it has too many other racist and sexist implications.
Martha Mathis57:47
When you know better, you do better.
Martha Mathis1:00:00
Figures
| Ella's age | 14 | 8:06 |
| Size of the core chat group | about 20 kids | 9:07 |
| Mother's age at the time of her stroke | 49 | 31:52 |
| Mother's current age | 79 | 40:08 |
| Courtney's current age | close to 50 | 40:08 |
| When Ike returned to the old movie theater | 2003, more than 20 years ago | 41:15 |
| Darren's age | 26 | 43:15 |
| Avalon's age | 6 | 52:32 |
Glossary
- Gen Alpha
- The generation born after 2010, often used as a contrast to Millennials' online behavior.
- walk-up song
- The signature music played when a baseball player comes up to bat.
How to listen
Listeners interested in generational divides, misread platform behavior, and family-relationship narratives; anyone doing community or content moderation will see the misjudgment mechanism in the first story.
The second story (returning to work at an old movie theater) has the least information; skippable.