Sep 21, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min · 21 segments
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Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wildcard, 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 it was just like gibberish.
Like I just, there was, there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of, of any of them.
They're just kind of these like clipped, weird, incoherent [laughs] postings that I was just like, it, it screamed bots just 'cause like any time that I see just kind of gibberish in like a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot.
But the fact that it was all from different accounts seemed very weird, and the fact that they also maybe seemed to be like interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
So yeah, I've got some from a later batch.
We've got some where it's like, you know, someone says, "Ah, okay, MH," and two people have hearted that.
Someone says, "Gilgamesh quit, and I'm crying.
Um, last Friday I broke up with my GF.
Your cats are so cute.
You're gorgeous in that dress.
OML.
Pink heart."
And I l- I went back to the Spotify comments again, and there was a new comment, and it said, "Uh, so it deleted my com." And that w- felt not bot-y.
That felt very strange that [laughs] a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it letting people know that it had been deleted.
So someone says, uh, username Cotton/Amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, uh, commented, "Weird." Uh, Aubrey commented, "That's weirds," two S's.
Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wildcard, 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 it was just like gibberish.
Like I just, there was, there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of, of any of them.
They're just kind of these like clipped, weird, incoherent [laughs] postings that I was just like, it, it screamed bots just 'cause like any time that I see just kind of gibberish in like a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot.
But the fact that it was all from different accounts seemed very weird, and the fact that they also maybe seemed to be like interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
So yeah, I've got some from a later batch.
We've got some where it's like, you know, someone says, "Ah, okay, MH," and two people have hearted that.
Someone says, "Gilgamesh quit, and I'm crying.
Um, last Friday I broke up with my GF.
Your cats are so cute.
You're gorgeous in that dress.
OML.
Pink heart."
And I l- I went back to the Spotify comments again, and there was a new comment, and it said, "Uh, so it deleted my com." And that w- felt not bot-y.
That felt very strange that [laughs] a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it letting people know that it had been deleted.
So someone says, uh, username Cotton/Amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, uh, commented, "Weird." Uh, Aubrey commented, "That's weirds," two S's.
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