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It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.

Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.

> I'll once again cut myself open to prove I'm not a computer

Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.

The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.

Came here to post this. Deer me later!

Life/teenagers find a way.

I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.

See also: similar mid-20th-century Bell System phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beep_line

> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.

This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.

Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?

> everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.

Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”

I actually love SoundCloud's timestamp based comments. It is pretty fun seeing someone's joyful reactions to a nice drop, beautiful vocals coming in, a brilliant lyrical phrase, etc. It's disappointing that this is not the primary mode of commenting on Spotify.

Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.

The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.

> 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.

: DD

my son did this in 8th grade (last year) but I think it was a google slide deck. The teach asked all the kids in class to do a slide or something and then he figured out review comments or something and they all started a group chat more or less. I can't quite remember but he was very proud of himself when he showed me hah.

Yeah I was going to comment about this: how, for years now at this point, kids have worked around district-enforced security against chat sites/apps on their school-issued Chromebooks by using various Google Workspace apps and features.

My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)

I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio

ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"

My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.

>This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.

At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.

I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.

This is gen alpha's squinting at scrambled cable porn haha

[2] https://mypowergrows.substack.com/p/posters-in-profile-davie

Presumably it would say

  GET BACK TO WORK

This is the first thing that came to mind. I remember how frustrated I was when they started cracking down on this behavior.

I'm IRL friends with some people I got to know that way back in the 2000s. We went through many a mod raid and migration to a new obscure board together.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xR5rKr-p6lc&ra=m

The Iranian revolution was due to messages spread on cassette tape. It's all Phillips's fault.

...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...

My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.

His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.

i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.

so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

These unaligned near frontier human agents have escaped containment and are out of control!

Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.

This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.

Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.

What is the ulterior motive?

This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?

I don't get it, what's the issue with the phrase?

We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.

People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.

If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.

Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).

They tried to impose age verification on OS

The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

My browser too. Letters are all offset up/down by 1px:

https://i.imgur.com/1NDF3n6.png

Peak HN comment :-)