The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section?
When NPR staffers flagged strange comments under their podcasts on Spotify as bots, it took a Gen Z colleague to (immediately) figure out the mystery.
In a surprising turn of events, NPR's podcast "Wild Card" has become an unexpected hangout spot for middle schoolers. This revelation surfaced last fall when the podcast's team noticed an influx of perplexing comments under their Spotify episodes. Initially, a producer assumed these comments were generated by bots, sharing the suspicious screenshots in NPR's Slack.
However, further investigation by Hannah Chin, a Gen Z colleague, revealed that these weren't bots but rather middle schoolers using the comments section to communicate. The peculiar behavior was also observed on TED Radio Hour show the previous year. When questioned about the phenomenon, a middle schooler candidly explained, "Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments."
NPR's long-serving host, Ira Glass, expressed his shock upon learning about the situation, stating, "I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear."
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