tl;dr: An NPR producer noticed strange gibberish comments flooding a low-traffic podcast episode and assumed they were bots, even reporting them to Spotify. A Gen Z colleague recognized the behavior immediately: middle schoolers, blocked from mainstream social media, were creating public Spotify playlists containing single podcast episodes and using the comment sections as improvised group chats. They deliberately chose obscure NPR shows to avoid detection—partly because their parents' NPR habit provided plausible cover if caught.