Re: Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.

One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.

I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.

Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.

jonty, 15 hours ago