How Teens Turn Podcast Episodes Into Secret Chat Rooms

What happens when teens can’t use social media? They turn podcast comments into group chats. Jordan shares how Spotify became an unexpected gathering place for kids. 

Plus, a recording glitch leads to a new sync fix in Session, and we debate whether timestamped comments could make podcast conversations more useful.

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Transcript

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Backup Drama And A Sync Fix

Jordan 0:00

All right guys, I got to fun-

Kevin 0:01

no no no me first because I am Furious with the two of you.

Jordan 0:07

What do we do?

Kevin 0:08

Because both of you last week, you were both like, we don't run backups. Session never has a problem. I can jump out of a plane without a parachute. I don't need a seatbelt in my car.

Jordan 0:18

Yeah.

Kevin 0:19

And then an hour after the recording, Jordan sends me a message. There's something wrong with my recording.

Jordan 0:24

Yeah.

Kevin 0:25

So thank you.

Alban 0:28

Why are you blaming me? I trusted you. You're the one who said jump out of the plane.

Kevin 0:32

No.

Jordan 0:33

You told us to jump.

Kevin 0:35

Yeah. You goobers. You totally jinxed us.

Jordan 0:39

We did.

Alban 0:40

What happened?

Kevin 0:41

Uh, I investigated it. It it wasn't, I don't think it was a session problem. It was a a problem with Jordan's either her laptop or her camera. But it just dropped some frames. And then when she tried to cut those frames out, it made the video out of sync with the audio. Which led itself to a really nice improvement because now session will check like that the video frames are the same duration as the audio frames. And if they're not, it fixes them before it finalizes your video. So it's like another robustness feature that I was able to build this week. But it took me like a long time, many days to figure this out and to build this. And not me, but a lot of tokens were spent on this. And so I hope you're happy.

Alban 1:20

Thank you, ChatGPT. Me too. I'm not going to change anything. I'm not running a backup. I know that I probably should. But the backups I was running before. So that when we first started doing the double ender and then the triple enders, I was recording with the Rodecaster. And like a couple times a year, it would just mess up. And I don't really know what it was, but if I shut it all down and restarted it, it would work again. But it I got that garbled voice quite a few times. So I don't know. I don't think the backups were helping anyway. So I don't I don't run a backup.

Kevin 1:55

All right. Well, I just yelled at you for not running a backup. So I'm not gonna talk about it anymore. I don't want you guys to talk about it anymore. Thanks for pressure testing the software once again. All right, what's the news of the week?

Teens Using Spotify Comments To Chat

Jordan 2:06

All right, so I have a fun one for you guys today. There was an episode of um This American Life like a week or so ago. And at the beginning of it, they were talking to the producer of Wildcard, Dave Blanchard, about an issue that they ran into like a while back. And what it was was he was one day like looking at the Spotify comments on the podcast.

Alban 2:32

Oh, I saw this.

Jordan 2:33

Okay. This is so fun.

Alban 2:35

I saw Ira Glass did a bit about this online. Yes. Okay, sorry. This is great.

Jordan 2:39

Yeah, it's it's such a fun little bit. Um, but yeah, so he looks at these comments on his on one of the episodes, and it looks like just a ton of bot activity. It's just like, it's all nonsense, none of it makes sense. He can't make heads or tails of it. And he's just like, oh my gosh, these bots are like flooding our comments. And so he deletes all of them. And then he comes back a while later and uh one of the like, you know, quote unquote bots says, Someone delete my comment. And he was just like, wait, what? And so he's trying to figure out what's going on. And one of the Gen Z employees at NPR is like, that's not bots, that's teens. So he they figured out that teens have been using Spotify podcast episodes as chat rooms to get around social media restrictions.

Alban 3:30

They had this great bit where they interviewed, like, I don't know, 14-year-old or something, and they got her on and she's like talking, and they're like, So why do you pick our podcast? She goes, Well, there weren't any other comments on there, so we knew it was good because nobody else was listening.

Jordan 3:48

Yeah, and and what's so wild is the reason why they started using these and these like podcast episodes in Spotify is because what had happened was um, you know, like these 11-year-olds or 12-year-olds or 14-year-olds didn't have TikTok. Like their parents wouldn't let them have TikTok or anything like that. And so what people were doing was they would upload podcast episodes be on Spotify for creators, and it would be just like a compilation of TikTok reels. And um, so the teens would use that and they were following this podcast that this girl would like upload all these TikToks, and then it got banned on Spotify, but they were like, uh, we still kind of want to like chat with each other because we kind of created this community of like other kids that weren't allowed to watch these TikToks. And so uh one of the kids went and found an NPR episode. Um, and they put this one single episode into a Spotify playlist and called it Let's Chat Here, and then shared it with all the other kids.

Kevin 4:55

This is this is exactly the same story of Jurassic Park. Is it create like all female dinosaurs and then they still learn how to reproduce? Like the kids will find a way around your social media bands. Yeah. I don't know if it's the exact same story as Jurassic Park. It's the same story, same, same story.

Parenting Workarounds And Surprise Video Apps

Alban 5:12

I okay, so I had a very similar experience uh with my daughter. At some point, we were like, look, YouTube, like no matter what controls we put on it, no matter how conscientious she was about like, oh, I only watch these channels, she still was getting recommended stuff, and it was constantly stuff we would not approve of. And even when she was on YouTube kids, and I was like, hey, at some point we gotta take stop with YouTube, and so we cut off YouTube, and then I was sitting there, she's watching something, and I was like, What are you watching? And she's like, Oh, I'm watching Spotify, right? This is good to go. And I was like, Spotify has like Mr. Beast and like all these videos, it does. And for her, it was like, Yeah, you can use Spotify. I just was not aware that all this video content was in there at that point. The more that Spotify adds like short form video and long form video and all this extra stuff, comments, it ends up just becoming like an end run around all of the social media bands that they're trying in different countries or smoke social media bands happening in people's houses. And I think at some point, Spotify is gonna get itself on these lists of hey, we should also ban this app as well.

Jordan 6:26

A thousand percent. My kids have been grounded from like YouTube and you know, Roblox and things like that. And then I will find out later that they were using Spotify to chat with friends, even though they were like grounded from their like phone or something like that. You know what I mean? I'm just like, oh, they're just so sneaky.

Kevin 6:44

Moving on from the parenting thing, it's it's triggering a marketing idea in my head. Can we do this for our own shows? Can we go into Spotify and create like playlists and put our podcast in there and like name the playlist free open chat rooms for teens? Oh no, and from Snapchat for tickets.

Jordan 7:03

Hello, fellow teens. Come go talk here. Let's it's just so there.

Alban 7:08

Was it Jordan? At one point, somebody was like, I don't really understand what's going on, but they're like following the drama of all what the kids are talking about.

Jordan 7:16

Oh my gosh.

Alban 7:17

And there was like the adult is like, I don't really know if I should be reading all this, but I'm like highly invested now in the drama that's going

When Podcasters Get Pulled Into Teen Drama

Alban 7:24

on.

Jordan 7:24

That's exactly what happened. I found this uh like random podcast that had experienced the same thing. It was called uh Idiot Mystic. And he literally like posted an episode talking about all this high school drama that unraveled in his podcast comment sections, and he didn't know what was happening. And so, like, all these kids are freaking out about Sydney. Like, Sydney's super upset, and he's like, Who's Sydney? Like, what's going on? And they're like, No, Sydney's fine. Like, we're just we're we're really like concerned about her. And this other guy's like, No, I've got Sydney, like it's all good. And he's like, What's going on with Sydney? And they're like, Well, Corbin cheated on her and she's super mad about it. And he's like, What? What's this Corbin guy doing? And so he has an entire episode. It's like, I don't know, like 20 or 30 minutes long. And he's reading through the comments, and you're learning about these kids' drama as he's reading through it. And it was, I was, I was invested too by the end of it, honestly. But it's funny because he has a podcast about like meditation and like spirituality and stuff like that. And so he's telling the kids, like, hey, this sounds really stressful. You should try meditation.

Alban 8:32

But it's a boost to the algorithm. What we need to do, there's this whole genre of podcasts and like Twitter content and YouTube content that is Reddit stories. People will go onto Reddit, they'll find the most unhinged relationship stories, and they basically just read it and then they react to it. You know, you've seen all this like bogus reaction content. Well, we need to go find these crazy stories, seed our own comments with like back and forth drama, just from like just ripping Reddit stories and posting them in there. People will be like, I'm invested, and now they're feeding the comments, and all the while Buzzcast is moving up the charts.

Conspiracy Talk And How It Spreads

Kevin 9:13

It feels a little bit like hard to believe, doesn't it? Like high school kids like in mass, like more than just a couple of them at a time being banned from all easy social media chat apps. So no Snapchat, no WhatsApp, no iMessage, no they can't do any of those normal things. So they have to they can't even like find online forums or something like to place chats, they end up in Spotify comments on podcasts. I don't know. I think we need a deeper investigation into this. I think it only takes one or two people who can't use WhatsApp. No, no, but then how do they land in Spotify comments? I really think this could be just a marketing scheme from NPR. I think the whole thing is. This is blow the story wide open.

Jordan 9:59

I think it's it's all put it in the comments.

Kevin 10:02

I don't think I don't think Sydney and Corbin are real.

Jordan 10:05

That wasn't Sydney and Corbin. This was like a totally random podcast. That wasn't even NPR. There's other podcasters.

Kevin 10:11

Like I found some on Reddit that you have to do it in other podcasts too to make it seem real, Jordan. You've got to take it otherwise. You're right. Yeah, obviously.

Jordan 10:18

I mean, there is there is kind of like a genius thing to this, if it is like let's let's just pretend that it is actually kids, you know, if we're assuming that you're correct, Kevin.

Alban 10:28

Like, let's just this conspiracy is like spiraling out of control.

Jordan 10:31

Let's pretend that it is kids. It's actually like very smart of them to be chatting in MPR playlists because if their parents look at like their their Spotify usage or things like that, it's gonna show a bunch of like MPR episodes. And I know as a parent, I'd be like, ooh, okay, yeah, go off.

Alban 10:50

Like very sophisticated.

Jordan 10:52

Do it. Keep at it.

Alban 10:54

But do you remember this uh thing that schools that had banned a bunch of websites, but they still gave the kids all Chromebooks, and then there were entire social media that kids had spun up that were all just like commenting on a Google Doc. Remember these stories? Like, I think it's just the same. It's like, hey, we all have access to these apps, and the one app we all seem to have access to is Spotify. Let's move it there. Because all you need is like one or two kids you want in the chat room to not have whatever app is available. And then you go, cool, let's find one that we all have. And it probably for a lot of them is Spotify.

Kevin 11:30

Again, Buzzcast, a perfect candidate for this.

Jordan 11:32

So maybe we should just do that, like uh Buzzsprout podcast chats or something. We there there's there's gotta be an idea in here.

Kevin 11:40

This this may go down as our most useless episode ever.

Alban 11:43

Is it useless?

Kevin 11:44

Yes.

The Real Need For Podcast Comments

Alban 11:45

But you know what it does keep reminding me? There is in me like a latent demand for comments on podcasting content. And it doesn't work as well because on YouTube I'm kind of sitting there fingers on the keyboard, ready to type in. But it would be nice if I had an app where I could just go in there and there were like a handful of thoughtful comments pulled in from around the web. We there there were so many times people were trying to figure out how we can do cross-app comments. It would just be nice if people could leave comments on podcast episodes because there's so many times when I get a YouTube comment and they're funnier than the YouTube content itself. Uh it'd be cool if they could do it. I like the Spotify's trying to figure it out. But yeah, we need to figure out how to get the contents to be a little higher quality.

Kevin 12:32

Maybe there's an opportunity. I'm just thinking I think they work for short form content really well because the content itself is short form. So you can watch it in 30 seconds or a minute, and then you can post a sentence or two that's either additive or oftentimes just funny or something like that. Like you, it's a short piece of content, so a little short piece of content, uh comment, and I think that works. I think long form content is tough. Like if you if you watch an hour-long episode and then somebody you see this sometimes on the longer form videos that are on YouTube, the comment sections aren't as full. There's not as many comments, and sometimes I don't get nearly as much out of them because they might be talking about something that happened 45 minutes into the episode or something, and I'm just started it, and I open up the comments to see what people are talking about, and it's like, oh, like I'd have to watch an hour before that even made sense to me what this person's talking about. I just think it's a little bit harder to make the connection.

Alban 13:26

I think it's definitely hard. Um do you remember that this was part of what Anchor tried to do before Anchor did anything in podcasting? So before they even got into it, they were making embed players for like educational content where you could comment at specific points. Uh SoundCloud did this as well, where you could comment at specific points in a song. So as the song was playing, the comments were popping up. It would be nice if they could, maybe for podcasting, YouTube could try to pioneer this, or maybe an indie podcast app could where the comments could be tagged to a timestamp and then they'd show up so that we say, you know, I say, Oh, this was happening on an NPR podcast, and then there could be a comment going, Well, no, that wasn't actually an NPR podcast, that's blah, blah, blah podcast instead.

Kevin 14:12

You know, they do that for when you watch lives. The comments kind of come in more real time. And sometimes when you're watching a live replay, you can like replay the comments in sort of that live fashion too. Yeah.

Jordan 14:23

Oh.

Kevin 14:23

All right. Well, I don't know where we're gonna go anywhere. We're not gonna solve the commenting problem on podcasts

Wrap Up And Listener Feedback

Kevin 14:28

today, but that's true.

Jordan 14:29

I don't know. I you you said that this might be like the most useless uh story, but I think this was a really fun episode. I thought it was a really fun topic. And I think our listeners can tell us if they like useless uh topics and if they want us to cover more of those on the Quickcast in the future. So to let us know.

Alban 14:45

We've got more useless stuff for you next week. So much.

Jordan 14:48

So let's know. Tap the send us Fan Mail link in the show notes. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.