Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
孩子们将 NPR 在 Spotify 上冷门的评论区变成了秘密群聊
Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wild Card. And one of the less exciting and, in fact, rather tedious parts of his job is that he has to keep an eye on the comments that people post about the show online. And one day last fall on Spotify, he saw all this activity about this episode they did with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. And Dave thought, oh, her book was controversial. It must have struck a nerve, this episode. And then he looked at the comments.
Dave Blanchard 负责运营公共广播节目《Wild Card》。他工作中比较无趣、甚至相当繁琐的一部分，就是必须时刻关注人们在网上对该节目的评论。去年秋天的一天，他在 Spotify 上看到他们与作家 Elizabeth Gilbert 合作的那期节目出现了大量互动。Dave 心想，哦，她的书很有争议，这期节目一定触动了什么敏感神经。于是他查看了评论。
Dave Blanchard: And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of any of them. They’re just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like— it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it’s a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
Dave Blanchard：那简直就像是乱码。出现了一堆新评论，但我完全看不懂。它们只是一些简短、奇怪且语无伦次的内容，我当时就觉得——这绝对是机器人干的，因为每当我在网上看到乱码评论时，我都会默认那是机器人。但奇怪的是，这些评论来自不同的账户，而且它们似乎还在以某种方式互动，这看起来既诡异又不像是典型的机器人行为。
Ira Glass: Can I ask you to read some of those comments?
Ira Glass：能请你读一下其中的一些评论吗？
Dave Blanchard: So yeah, I’ve got some from a later batch. We’ve got some where it’s like, someone says, “Ah, OK, M-H.” And two people have hearted that. Someone says, “Gilgamesh quit and I’m crying.” “Last Friday I broke up with my GF.” “Your cats are so cute.” “You’re gorgeous in that dress. OML, pink heart.”
Dave Blanchard：好的，我这里有一些后来批次的评论。比如有人说：“啊，好的，M-H。”还有两个人点赞了。有人说：“吉尔伽美什退出了，我哭了。”“上周五我和女朋友分手了。”“你的猫真可爱。”“你穿那条裙子真漂亮。天哪，粉色爱心。”
Ira Glass: So OK, bots, he thought, some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.
Ira Glass：好吧，他心想，这肯定是机器人，某种能以某种方式互相回应的新型机器人。于是他删除了这些帖子。
Dave Blanchard: And I went back to the Spotify comments again. And there was a new comment that said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that felt not botty. That felt very strange that a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it, letting people know that it had been deleted.
Dave Blanchard：我又回到了 Spotify 的评论区。结果出现了一条新评论，写着：“哦，它删了我的评论。”这感觉就不像是机器人了。如果一个机器人能识别出帖子被删了，并发布评论告知大家它被删了，那感觉太奇怪了。
Ira Glass: And then there were other responses to that.
Ira Glass：随后还有其他人对此做出了回应。
Dave Blanchard: So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I’m back, bitches, commented, “Weird.” Aubrey commented, “That’s weirdss,” two S’s.
Dave Blanchard：有人说，用户名是 cotton/amity（括号里写着“我回来了，婊子们”），评论道：“真怪。”Aubrey 评论道：“太怪了（weirdss）”，用了两个 S。
Ira Glass: This is really not looking like any bot behavior he’d ever seen. So he goes to NPR’s Slack channels, post some screenshots, describes what these comments are. And one of the higher-ups, Matilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They’re 10 years younger than Dave— Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chinn.
Ira Glass：这看起来确实不像他见过的任何机器人行为。于是他去了 NPR 的 Slack 频道，发布了一些截图，描述了这些评论的情况。其中一位高管 Matilde 建议向 Spotify 举报，Dave 照做了。随后，NPR 的一位年轻人看到了这个帖子。她比 Dave 小 10 岁——是 Z 世代，而不是千禧一代，名叫 Hannah Chinn。
Hannah Chinn: And I click into the screenshots, and almost immediately I’m like, oh. My conclusion is really, really different than Dave’s and Matilde’s, because I’m like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, posting on forums and stuff. And so I look at their display names. Their display names are, like, Ella with five emojis. And they’re the special character emojis. They’re the ones that you have to go onto the internet and type your name into a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to special paste it into your profile.
Hannah Chinn：我点开截图，几乎立刻就反应过来了。我的结论与 Dave 和 Matilde 的截然不同，因为我觉得：这些是小孩子。我想部分原因是因为我上初中时也经常上网，在论坛上发帖之类的。我看了看他们的显示名称。他们的名字比如“Ella”后面跟着五个表情符号。而且是那种特殊字符表情。你需要上网把名字输入到一个特殊的文本生成器里，生成特殊字符，然后再复制粘贴到个人资料里。
Ira Glass: Their profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah’s never seen before. And then there’s the way that they’re commenting back and forth with each other, short little phrases. I’m sorry. That’s weird. Lots of hi’s, lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.
Ira Glass：他们的头像都是 Hannah 从未见过的卡通人物。还有他们互相评论的方式，都是简短的小短语。“对不起。”“真奇怪。”有很多“嗨”，有很多多余的感叹号。Hannah 认出了这种行为。她自己在保守家庭长大，接受过家庭教育，接触社交媒体的机会有限。
Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
Hannah Chinn：我小时候就是那种会利用互联网奇怪角落的人，我用它们的方式并不是为了原本的设计初衷，而是为了和朋友聊天。我和朋友在 Google Docs 上来回交流。我们会打字，然后删掉，或者把文字颜色改成白色，在白色背景下让它们变得不可见。所以我认为这种行为对我来说很熟悉。
Ira Glass: So Hannah writes out a comment to post on Slack, shows it to their housemate before posting because they’re worried about coming off maybe too harsh with these much higher-ranking, older NPR bosses who Hannah had never met in person.
Ira Glass：于是 Hannah 写了一段评论准备发到 Slack 上，在发布前先给室友看了看，因为她担心对这些职位更高、年纪更大且从未谋面的 NPR 老板们说话显得太生硬。
Hannah Chinn: And I say, OK, maybe I’m wrong, but I think these are just kids hanging out and we shouldn’t report them as bots. My guess is that they’re just using Spotify comment threads as their group chat, maybe because other apps on their phones are blocked. Who knows? And they happen to have chosen a wild card episode to do it, LOL. These are middle schoolers.
Hannah Chinn：我说，好吧，也许我错了，但我认为这只是一群孩子在玩耍，我们不应该把他们举报为机器人。我猜他们只是把 Spotify 的评论区当成了群聊，也许是因为他们手机上的其他应用被屏蔽了。谁知道呢？而且他们碰巧选了一期《Wild Card》节目来做这件事，哈哈。他们是初中生。
Ira Glass: Middle schoolers specifically, not high schoolers?
Ira Glass：特指初中生，不是高中生？
Hannah Chinn: Yeah, these are people who are new to chatting with each other on the internet and in real life. They’re kids who are excited to talk to other people on the internet. 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 in the chat.
Hannah Chinn：是的，他们是刚开始在网上和现实生活中互相聊天的人。他们是那种对在网上与人交流感到兴奋的孩子。目标只是为了与人建立联系。你们没什么可聊的，彼此也不太熟悉。你们只是在聊天中看到对方，并确认对方的存在。
Ira Glass: Dave reads Hannah’s Slack message. And, well, he is not convinced. He posts—
Ira Glass：Dave 读了 Hannah 的 Slack 消息。嗯，他并不信服。他回复道——
Dave Blanchard: That’s an interesting theory.
Dave Blanchard：“这是一个有趣的理论。”
Ira Glass: Yeah, that’s an interesting theory. There’s an exclamation point at the end of it, at least to give it that much credit.
Ira Glass：是的，“这是一个有趣的理论。”结尾处有一个感叹号，至少给了它这点面子。
Dave Blanchard: Yes. Admittedly, I was still like, really? Again, this is Wild Card with Rachel Martin on NPR— not our target demo to have a bunch of middle schoolers in our comment section. It just felt so completely implausible that these people would have found this particular episode as their place to chat.
Dave Blanchard：是的。不得不承认，我当时还是觉得：真的吗？再说一次，这是 NPR 的《Wild Card》节目——我们的目标受众可不是一群初中生。我觉得这些人会把这期特定的节目当作聊天场所，这简直太不可思议了。
Hannah Chinn: Dave is like, oh, that’s an interesting theory. And I, at this point— sorry, Dave. I don’t know you in real life. I’m a little bit annoyed. Because I’m like, I know that I said “maybe I’m wrong,” but I was so sure that I was right.
Hannah Chinn：Dave 说，“哦，这是一个有趣的理论。”而我当时——抱歉，Dave，我在现实生活中不认识你。我有点恼火。因为我想，虽然我说过“也许我错了”，但我其实非常确定我是对的。
Ira Glass: Hannah does more digging, which makes them even more convinced than before. What the kids seemed to be doing was one kid would create a playlist on Spotify with a name like “Let’s chat here.” And inside that playlist would be one podcast episode. And you know how you can see other people’s playlists…
Ira Glass：Hannah 进行了更深入的挖掘，这让她比以前更加确信了。这些孩子似乎是在做这件事：其中一个孩子会在 Spotify 上创建一个播放列表，名字叫“在这里聊天”。播放列表里只有一期播客节目。你知道你可以看到别人的播放列表……