The most well liked new hangout for center schoolers is NPR’s remark part?

Parents have spent years attempting to maintain their youngsters off social media, so some youngsters headed to the one place no grownup would assume to search for them: NPR.

On this week’s “This American Life,” host Ira Glass tells the story of the workforce behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who seen a flood of baffling feedback underneath their Spotify episodes final fall. A producer assumed the weird abbreviations and indecipherable emojis had been bot visitors and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify.

But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, took one take a look at the screenshots and acknowledged, virtually instantly by Glass’s telling, that these weren’t bots. They had been seemingly center schoolers who had been too younger for social media, operating a bunch chat within the feedback of the podcast. (Perhaps somebody at NPR ought to have grokked this sooner: it noticed youngsters doing the identical factor on TED Radio Hour present final yr.)

As for why NPR specifically, when Glass tracked down one of many youngsters to ask, he was given the sort of unvarnished reply {that a} center schooler would give: “Um, I feel we simply, like, seemed for podcasts that didn’t have many feedback.”

“I let you know, buddy,” responded Glass, who has hosted “This American Life” for 3 many years, “I do a public radio present, and that hurts a little bit to listen to.”