The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section?

初中生最火的新社交聚集地，竟然是 NPR 的评论区？

The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section? Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, so some kids headed to the one place no adult would think to look for them: NPR. 初中生最火的新社交聚集地，竟然是 NPR 的评论区？多年来，家长们一直试图让孩子远离社交媒体，于是有些孩子转而去了大人们根本想不到的地方：NPR（美国国家公共电台）。

On this week’s “This American Life,” host Ira Glass tells the story of the team behind NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes last fall. A producer assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR’s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify. 在本周的《This American Life》节目中，主持人 Ira Glass 讲述了 NPR 播客“Wild Card”团队的故事。去年秋天，该团队注意到他们的 Spotify 剧集下涌现出大量令人困惑的评论。一位制作人起初以为那些奇怪的缩写和难以解读的表情符号是机器人流量，并将截图分享到了 NPR 的 Slack 工作群中，随后他们向 Spotify 举报了这些帖子。

But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, took one look at the screenshots and recognized, almost immediately by Glass’s telling, that these weren’t bots. They were likely middle schoolers who were too young for social media, running a group chat in the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps someone at NPR should have grokked this sooner: it spotted kids doing the same thing on TED Radio Hour show last year.) 但身为 Z 世代同事的音频制作人 Hannah Chin 看了一眼截图，据 Glass 所述，她几乎立刻就认出这些并非机器人。这很可能是一群还没到使用社交媒体年龄的初中生，他们把播客评论区当成了群聊室。（也许 NPR 的人早该意识到这一点：去年他们就曾在《TED Radio Hour》节目中发现孩子们做过同样的事。）

As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.” 至于为什么偏偏是 NPR，当 Glass 找到其中一个孩子询问时，他得到了一个初中生才会给出的、毫不修饰的回答：“嗯，我想我们只是……找了一些评论不多的播客。”

“I tell you, buddy,” responded Glass, who has hosted “This American Life” for three decades, “I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear.” “伙计，我跟你说，”主持了三十年《This American Life》的 Glass 回应道，“我做的是公共广播节目，听到这个还真有点扎心。”