The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY</a>)<p>Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.<p>Some of this is documented in audio, on <a href="https://evan-doorbell.com/" rel="nofollow">https://evan-doorbell.com/</a> for anyone interested.
The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.<p>One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.<p>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.<p>Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.<p>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.
This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.
My son at 11 was targeted by a pedophile on spotify's comments.
Thought it was safe app to allow, just music/podcasts.
nope.
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.
The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.
It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.<p>See also:<p>- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]<p>- 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]<p>[0] <a href="https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-friendship-love-death.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri...</a> ( <a href="https://archive.is/vs8OD" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/vs8OD</a> )<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast-bloomberg.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...</a>
Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.<p>We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.<p>: DD
My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)
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Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.<p>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<p>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!
> 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<p>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.
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away<p>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.<p>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.
> 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)<p>Say more!
The might or might not is a critical part of why the panopticon works..
"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"<p>This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
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.<p>More info:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w</a>
I can almost hear the next agent swarm furiously brainstorming how to most credibly steganographically write like middle schoolers.
>secret group chat, etc.<p>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.<p>Just a thought, though ..
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.
I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.
Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.
First the chat agents, now the kids!
Chat Here YC26
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
Reminds me of the old slashdot post from 25yrs ago that people still chat on
"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."<p>Such an excellent line from a young person.
Now we know where the "rogue" AI agents got the ideas from.
Just like sid=trolltalk on Slashdot.
I listened to This American Life from the first episode until they abandoned their mobile app. It was so easy for me to use it and mark things. I even emailed them about it; they said it cost too much to operate. It didn't make sense to me. I guess I will go back to listening to them again on Apple Podcasts. I even exported my playlist with data from their old app; not sure how I will sync with the Apple Podcasts app, though... Another challenge for Fable to solve, I guess.
Kids have done rogue. Stop the trainings!!
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.
Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.
A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?<p>The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
Well now all the agents will have this in their training data, so expect them to come calling in the future :-) :-)
> 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.<p>Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?<p>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.
<i>This American Life</i> is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.<p>Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? <i>enculturate</i> is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you <i>were</i> trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
What is the ulterior motive?<p>This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?
I don't get it, what's the issue with the phrase?
Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....
We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
They tried to impose age verification on OS
The problem is for-profit corporate social media.<p>Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.<p>Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.<p>Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.<p>Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.<p>But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.<p>Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.<p>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.
I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.
The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.<p>Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.<p>Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.<p>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.
It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it <i>worse</i>.<p>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.<p>[1] It was also <i>great</i> for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
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Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
I <i>really</i> dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?