You would be correct, except that this is a published blog post. It may not be in an academic journal, but this person has still conducted human subjects resear

You would be correct, except that this is a published blog post. It may not be in an academic journal, but this person has still conducted human subjects research that led to a published artifact. It was just "playing around" until they started posting their students' (summarized, anonymized) data to the internet.