“I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
Proof that your work can be objectively good even if nobody is talking about it.
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I listened to the broadcast when it was (re)aired and it was also a driveway moment. The kids were fairly clever using their Spotify play lists to node lock onto an online comment forum that had very little traffic in the way of listener comments.
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Hysterically, The Onion “predicted” this over a decade ago!
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This reminds me of the latest season of Perfect Match (a dating reality show on Netflix) where contestants were colluding via Spotify DMs. Apparently no one on production realized Spotify had DMs.
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There used to be (maybe still is?) a thriving Warrior Cats roleplaying community in the book reviews on the Barnes & Noble website. Teens are very resourceful.
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How do you collude on a dating show?
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In Perfect Match you have a bunch of people in “the house” and every night they pair off in a round of musical chairs. Whoever is left without a match leaves the house. There are singles all waiting in a hotel nearby that are periodically sent in to try and break up the pairings. Most people want to stay in the house because they get actual screen time (we do not see hotel people until they are sent in), are eligible to win the final prize if they are a couple at the end of the show…and maybe they also get paid more for being in the house, but I only speculate on that.
It can be fiddly because people who are eliminated go back to the hotel but can be brought back later. I think there was a couple split between the house and hotel communicating over Spotify and trying to strategically get one of them back by biding time and deceiving someone about their authenticity in another relationship…it didn’t amount to much in the end, but people were still upset. A lot of people on dating shows don’t want to openly discuss strategic gameplay usually because it makes them seem fake and like they aren’t there for a romantic connection. Even if everyone is actually a bit fake, exposing yourself just creates a really easy moral justification for everyone to oust you.
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people have been using the gamefaqs message boards for decades like this haha, find a game no one talks about and bam free message board
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I have heard about this! Apparently many did not have regular access to computers/smartphones and accessed this via Nook ereaders.
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When I was a kid, before we started hanging out on LiveJournal, I talked to other kids from my country in the guest book of our official Animorphs web site. The adult translator of the books hung out there too, he was a moderator I think, and he gave sage advice to all of us angsty children.
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I should probably be more embarrassed to admit that my earliest introduction to social media was posting snarky comments on the “Beverly Hills 90210” fan board, pre-Explorer1.0 era.
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Heh, yeah that’s what I had been about to say.
I guess the difference is, kids who were doing that in the early 2000s were already also using the main message boards of gamefaqs for on-topic conversation. There were far fewer young people online compared to now, and for those who were, their average tech literacy and access to this stuff was higher than the current equivalent populace’s.
-Wade
I listen to a podcast that plays bad games and they always check to see if there are hidden message boards haha
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The (ab)use of forgotten boards is ancient: more related to IF, the morphing of alt.xtrek (originally an usenet board for discussing the strategy game XTrek) into the main board for AIF debate is well-known to veterans of the days of usenet)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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In addition to the fun reminiscing about re-wilding the internet’s unclaimed spaces, I also thought it was relevant for people who worry that nobody is discussing their work.
This NPR podcast was kind of a big deal! People weren’t discussing it in the Spotify comments section, but they were engaging with it elsewhere.
Similarly, some works of interactive fiction might be making impacts in places that aren’t easily observed.
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Didn’t r*if sort of hijack a previously existing group where there wasn’t much going on? 
It’s before my time, so I don’t know whether there was really nothing goin on, but I know that by the time I found it, r*if was definitely for text adventures!
Before my time too, but I believe that was the case with raif specifically. Per Jimmy Maher:
The most amusing of the rare collisions between literary hypertext and the hobbyist interactive-fiction community must be the history of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction. Being apparently unaware that for many thousands of people the term “interactive fiction” meant text adventures — especially the text adventures of Infocom — literary-hypertext practitioners tried to appropriate the term for themselves around the time of Eastgate’s release of afternoon, setting up rec.arts.int-fiction to discuss their own very different interests. It was promptly invaded by vastly greater numbers of text-adventure fans wanting to talk about the old Infocom games, whereupon the literary-hypertext people departed in a huff, leaving the newsgroup, alongside its companion group rec.games.int-fiction, to become the central discussion forum of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance of the 1990s.
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