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Comments (109)

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  xnx
  The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
• gumby
  French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!
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  jonty
  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.One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.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.Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
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  bullfightonmars
  I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.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.
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  nyargh
  Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.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, etcNow 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!
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  m4ck_
  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.
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  y-curious
  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
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  valorzard
  Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
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  jhallenworld
  "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"This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
• CM30
  Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.
• FrankSansC
  In some ways it reminds me of XKCD #1305 "Undocumented Feature" [0][0] https://xkcd.com/1305/
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  epistasis
  It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.See also:- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]- 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][0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...
• eli
  I went through this same experience moderating the comment section of a business news site nearly 20 years ago. I think they needed to find a site not blocked by the firewall in the school computer lab.
• lxgr
  I can almost hear the next agent swarm furiously brainstorming how to most credibly steganographically write like middle schoolers.
• thaack
  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.More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
• sans_souse
  Ever tried joining an IRC channel on any of the many servers with lenient policies on moderation etc, based on the channels name/ description? Sort of a similar experience..
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  MomsAVoxell
  >secret group chat, etc.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.Just a thought, though ..
• statenjason
  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.
• Tepix
  First the chat agents, now the kids!
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  alexjplant
  I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.
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  hyperlinerapp
  Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.
• Traster
  Hang on, are our kids learning from AI agents? Do we have a child alignment problem? Do we need to put our kids in a sandbox. At this rate our kids are going to out live us, I for one, am panicking.
• sampton
  Kids have done rogue. Stop the trainings!!
• micromacrofoot
  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
• TuringNYC
  Reminds me of the old slashdot post from 25yrs ago that people still chat on
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  adaml_623
  "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."Such an excellent line from a young person.
• hughw
  Chat Here YC26
• barbazoo
  Now we know where the "rogue" AI agents got the ideas from.
• magoghm
  Now we have rogue kids escaping their sandbox :)
• system2
  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.
• ok123456
  Just like sid=trolltalk on Slashdot.
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  tamimio
  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.
• neilellis
  Well now all the agents will have this in their training data, so expect them to come calling in the future :-) :-)
• JMKH42
  My son at 11 was targeted by a pedophile on spotify's comments. Thought it was safe app to allow, just music/podcasts. nope.
• pvtmert
  Alternate reality: AI agents break their "alignment" and escape sandbox using Spotify comments. /s
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  sublinear
  > 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.Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?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.
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  paulajohnson
  Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....
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  pteraspidomorph
  I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?