21 ms·

Problems at Roblox

485 points by memorable 4y ago

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
- Cerium 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that the situation has materially changed in the last five months? Perhaps you have some detail to share?
phren0logy 4y ago
Some of this blog post is over-reaching, which is a shame because the clear and significant problems need absolutely no embellishment.
- bri3d 4y ago
  This - definitely, any platform with a userbase that's substantially comprised of children and which offers free communication is going to be a complete disaster requiring ridiculous amounts of moderation and careful parental involvement. It is clear that Roblox have failed to deliver the moderation capabilities necessary to market their platform as "safe," and are more interested in making money. But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything? And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all. This essay, and this substack in general, really lack focus - they publish dramatic exposés which are just a hodgepodge of random "dirt" thrown together, some interesting and serious and mostly nothing.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all. Half-baked? It's enough if casino sites exist for a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws.
    - bri3d 4y ago
      This is skin gambling, where in-game items are wagered by proxy, so the actual structure of the gambling is unfortunately somewhat nuanced. I agree that it's unethical and Roblox failing to crack down on these sites by any means they can, again, represents a failing. But I'd have liked to see a separate post with a deeper investigation into how the gambling sites are structured, and how the cash-out economy works. Proxy-gambling using skins and secondary markets has been highly controversial since at least the CS:GO days and unfortunately it _isn't_ that clear that there's a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws on the part of Roblox. Valve have been somewhat successful so far in defending themselves against the Washington gaming commission and many lawsuits surrounding CS:GO skin gambling. But, Roblox have a direct cash-out program for in-game content developers which may change their situation. I'd again, have loved to seen this investigated more in another blog post. This one was weirdly unfocused to me because it started with serious, well-founded allegations of inadequate moderation leading to harm to children, in contrast to "safe" marketing. Then it progressed to a random aside accusing a safety officer of being a furry (???). And then flipped to another aside about finding a gambling site.
      - philistine 4y ago
        Watch the people make games videos about Roblox. That will answer all your questions about it’s operations.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    > But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything? It's one thing to watch/engage with this stuff privately in your personal life. It's quite another thing to have: >> Roblox’s former social media manager ran a public pornographic blog with “furry porn” and photos of himself And >> Roblox’s official verified Twitter account retweeted content from “DukeButDuke” with #FanArtFriday. This is not > jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows This is Roblox's public representatives at a high level in the company publicly promoting this stuff. Put another way, if you posted a blog article about furry porn and pictures of yourself nude, then prominently displayed it next to your public work profile, do you honestly think that your company would have no right to fire you? There's a reason lots of bloggers that work for big companies will put "this blog and these ideas have no affiliation with company X" disclaimers everywhere, and that's just for semi controversial blogging topics.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
chris_wot 4y ago
If this is true, I think I'll talk to my boss tomorrow about getting Roblox banned on our student systems.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  A brief Google suggests the problems aren’t new and are very prevalent.
- shagie 4y ago
  I'd suggest watching these to help inform your decision and conversation: Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers -- https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. -- https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
- zaptrem 4y ago
  Similar issues have existed on lightly or unmoderated online games since the dawn of time. Would you support banning Minecraft for the same reason? I think games that encourage technical and creative thinking stand to benefit more than they harm. They absolutely require closer parental supervision, though. Moreover, the developers at this company need to crack down on pedos both from without and (according to the article) within.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Try understanding the scale of Roblox first before thinking of anecdotes as relevant. Unless you're also terrified of cardiologists? [1] [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
- charcircuit 4y ago
  You might as well ban the internet too. And all phones. While you are at it make them where a gag when traveling between home and school to prevent them from talking to strangers.
  - 4y ago
adamrezich 4y ago
who could've foreseen that a microtransaction-based multiplayer user-generated content platform designed for children (with the ability to cash out in-game currency to real money(?!)) could've led to these sorts of problems
mrits 4y ago
The internet, social media, boy scouts, relatives, and everything else has these problems. It is why kids need parents.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Yes indeed, but at least some of the acts described in the blog post would land "normal", non-stock-listed forum operators in front of a court: aiding gambling activity and child abuse are serious crimes. There are numerous laws that detail the responsibilities of operating anything on the Internet that is targeted towards children, and Roblox seems to be completely ignoring these. Not to mention they are ignoring their moral responsibility of protecting their underage users. Roblox needs to shut down Robux redeeming immediately and prevent any kind of interaction where one account has not been verified to be of age and accounts that have been verified, and maybe allow interactions between close age groups. It's not that hard to do so.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Robux redeeming is how the people actually developing content for Roblox get paid.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      They have to find a different way then that does not allow pedophiles and gambling dens to flourish. Not my problem how they want to do this.
- softwaredoug 4y ago
  There are some specific structures and incentives that create situations that make it easy to groom children. We can work to correct those. For example Scouts relies (desperately) on volunteers. So unfortunately the “trusted adult” is perhaps sometime TOO interested in volunteering. And the Scout group sadly doesn’t think deeply enough cause they’re just happy to have a parent volunteer. You can see how this can create a dynamic that attracts the wrong kind of person that want to groom families to prey on children.
14 4y ago
My young son started telling me about his friend from Florida that he started talking to. I am from Canada and across the country so questioned if the person he was talking to was a real child or some pedophile. Thankfully he video called her soon after and it was another 10year old girl and they just liked to play online but it definitely worries and and I’m not sure how Roblox can tackle the issue.
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Get them a nintendo switch or Steam Deck. Roblox teaches kids about being exploited by scrip.
- roca 4y ago
  It won't be long before paedophiles can produce video avatars of themselves as children. In fact they might already be able to do that.
  - rtev 4y ago
    It’s already possible to do this in real-time
eptcyka 4y ago
Whilst the issues raised are serious and I don't want to detract from the severity of the allegations, but I really take issue with putting regular porn and furry porn in the same league as pedophilia.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pizzathyme 4y ago
  If the regular porn and furry porn are being shared with children, it is very serious
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    I agree, but then the issue is child abuse and should be clearly stated as such. Making vague remarks about someone's personal twitter account isn't that.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      It's one thing if some random employee doesn't take care about a social media account that can trivially be associated with their company. But high-ranked executives, particularly in sensitive departments?! JFC it's not that hard to create an anonymous account on any social media site except Facebook.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    But they aren't and the article doesn't suggest they are.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Expect both to be banned or at least the idea brought up the next time Republicans are in power. Edit: you can downvote me all you want but all you have to do is look at MTG’s Twitter profile to see what I’m talking about. For instance: https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-sec-230-2657233040 https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-sec-230-2657233040
Delphiza 4y ago
Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents. It _seems_ to have controls, and _seems_ to restrict bad behaviour, but it does not, and cannot. My daughter was roped into an online paedophile ring when she was 12. The initial contacts and grooming were made through Roblox... almost right under our noses. Every time we, as parents, looked at what she was doing, it seemed okay. We could have dug deeper, but did not. Luckily we caught it before it progressed too far, but some damage was done. Wherever you can, tell parents to flat-out block Roblox. Edit: Because people are asking how it works. Roblox is a lot about bragging rights for individuals. You gain skins, trade for rare items, buy Robux for real money that can be used to buy items. Players flock around those that that have rare or expensive items. My daughter had a "super super happy face". I just googled, and it is current selling for $350. It makes them feel wanted and important. So just like fornite and skins in other games. The groomers feed the celebrity, sense of community and so on to engage in chat. It starts as in-game chat, which you can never see the history of, before moving to DMs. The chat has tricks to get around removed words, so they all communicate in some sort of code that they all pick up along the way. Then they are able to divert them to other platforms where there are fewer controls. My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. Then they follow up on other platform calls (or phone calls) and follow the usual grooming techniques. The trick is to identify the marks by how they behave in the game, and in the more popular, and social ones, I think that it is quite easy (in retrospect).
- pizzathyme 4y ago
  It sounds like they are completely failing to scale their moderation teams with their platform. This is extremely dangerous and causes real harm. They need funded ML engineers, human reviewers, policy experts, product engineers, data scientists, and the will to protect people. Like any massive social network this is a moral imperative. I don’t know what the current state is of their roadmap but I hope for everyone’s sake that they get their act together quickly.
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    Honestly I don’t think there’s a single mega-platform which hasn’t failed to scale their moderation team.
jrockway 4y ago
I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum amount of communication two strangers can have on the Internet. You can choose 6 pre-made things to say to your opponent; Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten. This might be too much; I have definitely seen people get mad from their opponent using the voice lines too much. My thought is that this significantly reduces the richness of the in-game interactions (implies less engagement, implies less revenue), but doesn't need moderators to keep the game from being used for illegal sexual encounters, which is nice if your game targets kids.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > This might be too much Back when I played (early days), the common thing was indeed to mute opponents right when the game starts.
- acoard 4y ago
  Yes, essentially communication is a tool and any tool in a multiplayer game will be abused. Without playing any multiplayer Hearthstone, I can guarantee that some people would use "Well Played" after a mistake to insult players. Just like how in Rocket League people spam "What a save!" after an embarrassing miss. I totally agree that it removes the richness. You lose out on any meaningful, even if small or quaint, connections, and might as well be interacting with an AI that triggers a "Well played!" at the end of the game. There's no right answer here, it's an intractable problem since the beginning of the internet. It reminds me of the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog a bit. The problem is human nature projected into the internet. > A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "It is in my nature."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
  - 4y ago
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Good, there is a special place in silicon hell for those marketing the idea of scrip to kids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip This company has a lot of bad karma to settle, and their profit model is unsustainable.
vorpalhex 4y ago
Letting your child talk to strangers on the internet may not be the best idea. News at 11. No moderation system is flawless. If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content. I do find the digging in to the personal lives of the employees here pretty bad taste. Yes an adult can look at porn and have sexual relationships with other adults, whether they work at Roblox or Toys R Us.
- conductr 4y ago
  > If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content. Problem with this is kids are sneaky, curious and liars.
  - bruce343434 4y ago
    Maybe be straight up with them instead of "shielding" them so they're not curious anymore. As a European I find American culture extremely prude. And anything that's "forbidden" is automatically interesting. For some reason I genuinely don't understand however, most people prefer ignoring these kinds of factors of human nature and just keep forcing their values and norms when it's clearly not working.
    - engineeringwoke 4y ago
      It’s so absurd. They call their children sneaky liars in the Anglo-sphere and then never tell them the truth in a silly attempt to “protect” their innocence. Of course they are sneaky liars?
      - conductr 4y ago
        Not sure if this is pointed at me since I made the sneaky liar comment from my Anglo-sphere but I never once suggested to dodge telling them the truth. In fact, I’d combine telling them the truth with “that’s why we don’t talk to strangers online” whereas the quote I mentioned was about “if you’re going to allow them to talk to strangers online”. That shouldn’t be an option for kids this age. You have to do more than talk with them. You have to monitor them. You have to know what their doing. You have to accept that you still might not get throw, because they’re sneaky liars and if they want to break a rule they will. That’s what kids do. These kids at this age can also be curious about sex. Do you have actual parental experience that counters any of this because it seems you have strong opinions on how to parent? Also it sounds like you’re taking it personal as if I’m name calling the kids. That means you’re definitely lacking parental experience because it’s a simple fact that every kid is sneaky and lies albeit to various degrees.
deleted 4y ago
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tristor 4y ago
One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned. It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of the revenue comes from "whales", users that buy large quantities. In a game targeted at children, who themselves don't have income/credit cards, it's unlikely that the "whales" are in the target demographic. Rather, it is likely most of the "whales" are adults who are spending large in order to use the in-game currency to exploit interactions with others. Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing their business model. Their business model is essentially structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children over mobile platforms. On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even worse. It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the same way.
- 1234letshaveatw 4y ago
  I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens (and their parents)
  - tristor 4y ago
    $2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
concordDance 4y ago
This kind of insinuating nonsense is the worst of gutter journalism. An employee ran a pornographic blog? Their twitter retweeted something a pedophile made? The head of content moderation is a furry? So what?! This guilt by association nonsense is the law of contagion! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion
- nr2x 4y ago
  This isn’t some low level SWE with an unusual hobby, it’s the person whom this company is putting out as the reason parents should trust the product. It’s absolutely idiotic on a number of levels.
- sosodev 4y ago
  Do you really think it's okay for a kids game to promote an artist that openly admits to being pedophile?
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I think I don't believe anyone who just lumps furry porn, cartoon images of childlike anime, and paedophilia together. I auto-dismiss them. Especially when finding the furry porn required an investigation into catching said person's non-work Twitter that was named pseudonymously. You guys over-index on this nonsense because outrage is a drug injected directly into your brain. There's enough wrong about this platform that could be improved, but you're all more interested in just raging online and so you must invent this whole Axis-of-Evil. This, coming from someone whose sexual interests are pretty damned vanilla.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children to. Period. The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate. All of this is literally intuition, but we're being trained over time to ignore it in the name of sex-positivity and other nonsense. It's just grooming redefined.
smiddereens 4y ago
ramesh31 4y ago
Disney Toontown solved this problem 20 years ago. You give people a pre-populated list of things they can say, and that's it. There's literally no other way to protect kids on these services.
- midwestemo 4y ago
  I played Roblox in the past (like 2012?) and it did have one called Safe Chat. It got removed in 2014 according to here. https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/In-experience_chat#Filtering https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/In-experience_chat#Filtering
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    The wiki says it was replaced by a tool that kicks on for everyone under 13 that only lets them use words from a very specific whitelist. If they don't do this already they need to divide the player bases. Want to play in the <13 rooms? You have to use the same word whitelist they have.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  And hows Toontown doing now? There is a reason Roblox enables chat. It increases their engagement.
twawaaay 4y ago
My kids play Minecraft but they are not allowed to join servers with strangers. I set up some servers where they have freedom to do what they want but the only people they are allowed to play with are their friends from school and family.
duxup 4y ago
There's a lot of "so and so did bad things" and "Roblox terminated his account". Maybe they should be faster but I wonder if ultimately the solution that some folks would want is just no communication for kids apps ... I've got mixed feelings about that.
fabianhjr 4y ago
There are two video investigations from People Make Games into economic aspects of Roblox in particular child labor/exploitation and monopolistic aspirations via platform capitalism. 1. Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ ) 2. Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY )
libraryatnight 4y ago
Roblox is a cesspool. It's like 4chan ran a games platform.
pokoleo 4y ago
I once interned at an easily google-able Secondlife competitor. They fought against NSFW content for a long time, but then figured out how to fix it by: 1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW content, and 2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase) This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt with the NSFW content in one swoop.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  A) I don’t think #2 would be A good idea for a kids game, and B) kids will absolutely start to game #1 with shill accounts and you may well wind up increasing the amount of ‘evil stuff’ as kids bring it to the platform for the sole purpose of reporting it to get Robux/swag.
  - mock-possum 4y ago
    AKA The Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
- zkldi 4y ago
  Sounds like it'd just incentivise people to make NSFW content on burners and then report it.
zac23or 4y ago
Wow, Roblox has text/voice chat! I've worked on a comment system before, it's basically impossible to block bad behavior using filters, AI, whatever, users find a loophole and continue with the behavior. Mods are super needed. Text/voice chat + real money. It's a pedophile's paradise.
donkarma 4y ago
Roblox is extremely predatory outside of child grooming scenarios as well due to the fact that every game includes dark patterns in order to get them to spend money in order to progress because they won't get moderated. I imagine it would cause addictive behaviour.
ajb 4y ago
So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort. I wonder if there is an opportunity here to get a fully distributed effort going, based on web of trust. Most users don't do web of trust verification even in apps which support it, like signal, because it's not worth the effort for general low stakes communication. But people are willing to put in a lot of effort to keep their kids safe. And the requirement here: "I want my kids only to message adults I trust, or kids that an adult I trust has verified are kids" is a good match for web of trust, because it's basically an emulation of how the mark 1 meatspace method of doing it worked. (yes, my use case here is for younger kids, older ones should be able to explore more and I haven't figured out how that would work).
- larrik 4y ago
  > So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort. As a parent dealing with some of this currently, this isn't entirely how I'd put it. Roblox is marketed for kids, and claims to have a large number of parental controls, but in fact they either don't work or don't exist. Most parents aren't savvy enough to know they even need to check for that. Meanwhile, I'm extremely computer literate (a developer even), and have largely banned my kids from the internet, installed multiple blockers and monitors, and my kid still gets to shady places and content. It's f-ing impossible unless you are going to literally watch over their shoulder the whole time, which is wildly unrealistic and frankly immoral once they reach a certain age. It's exasperating.
  - operator-name 4y ago
    The curiosity for the forbidden/unknown is a powerful motivator for children. Destroying that magic by personally becoming invested can be quite effective. The same applies for things that are "cool" or whatever the current term is. Either you become part of the "in group" and earn some of your child's respect or whatever you touch no longer becomes corrupted by your "boomer energy". Both are a win and far more effective than the cat and mouse game of training them to be mini pen-testers.
imglorp 4y ago
Is no one talking about the valuation? OP says $38B, looks like about $20B today down from $60B in December [1]. Is this all potential upside from their token and service fees, or what? 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RBLX/key-statistics https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RBLX/key-statistics
alexk307 4y ago
Shocked to hear the responses on here. This is disgusting, regardless of the blogs writing style or your opinion on furry porn, some of the allegations are pretty gross. If your platform aims to attract children as their primary user base, this crap should not be happening as often as it does on their platform.
deleted 4y ago
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amatecha 4y ago
My thought: online games which children are playing, especially ~13 and younger, should NEVER have text chat typed on a keyboard. They should only allow symbolic communication like "emotes" and symbols, abstract and basic stuff. Moderation teams can not possibly ever keep up with the "arms race" of determined scammers and exploitative individuals. Just eliminate the entire class of problems upfront at the design stage. Save your company tons of money, too, both in staffing and in legal settlements.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  To Roblox's credit, they do take the "Club Penguin" approach: If you're under 13, you can only chat from a drop-down of chat options, and can only see messages sent using that functionality. Now, that doesn't stop kids from lying about their age when registering, but that's another can of worms.
- engineeringwoke 4y ago
  When do you let them grow up then? Or is it more about controlling your children than helping them?
nights192 4y ago
I admit I find the ferverent vociferations against ROBLOX as an entity somewhat disheartening; the game was cynosure to my childhood, providing precious experience to me in learning how to navigate social situations and cope with the rammifications thereof. Pedophiles did, and do, exist, but this is a fact of life in any manner of social media or large community; discussing frankly how malevolent some may be is imperative, even if it does not preempt all danger posed. The alternative, stifling all manners of creative expression available to those who may otherwise be socially shunted, is untenable to me, as it does not line up with what my experience growing up using this technology taught me. Nothing in life is without risk--exposure to this risk over a platform that's online, somewhat discoverable, and insulated is vastly preferable to keeping your kids blissful and unknowing of what would threaten them. Please do not attempt to parent in such a way that motivates your children to hide things from you and cut you out of the loop entirely.
warent 4y ago
As for the weird rapey song, it actually originates from a youtube channel that makes comedy videos. It's based on a creepy/horror game called Baldi's Basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo Obviously very NSFW In context, the song is just adult humor. But, yeah, definitely does not belong in a children's game.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  the video they link is misleading too, it misquotes / mishears the lyrics, despite the fact that the actual lyrics are easily googleable... there's a lot about this article that needlessly misses the mark, it's annoying.
roca 4y ago
Welcome to the metaverse.
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
Roblox must die, the monster that eats children.
Jtothe5 4y ago
Old news people. This pops up every time the short sellers are on the prowl.
deleted 4y ago
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Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t quite understand what produces the value of these Roblox items? As far as I’ve seen anyone can download the toolkit and build their favorite hat.
lampshades 4y ago
Welp. I guess my kids won't be playing with that.
Gatsky 4y ago
Is there a for-profit venture targeted at children which isn't harmful? Book publishing I guess. Struggling to think of others.
- flerovium 4y ago
  The authors, who pay the bulk of the labor costs, aren't usually motivated by the money.
jkfdsjklfdjksla 4y ago
There is no good reason for kids to have tablets and smartphones, and parents who give those devices to their kids are bad parents. Those parents also make it hard or impossible to make that choice myself as a parent, because I also don't want my kids to be the odd ones out or social pariahs. There is also practically no good reason for adults to own such things, as they are designed to fritter away your attention on the cheapest content possible (generally old, re-hashed "community generated" content). In my opinion.
ilikeitdark 4y ago
Sadly my nine year old daughter is addicted, and have trying "soft" measures to get her away from it (like buying a Switch and Animal Crossing) but all her friends are on Roblox. Has anyone seen any good videos for kids that explain the negatives of Roblox, and tried any successful methods with their children?
- flerovium 4y ago
  This is the real problem.
jamescodesthing 4y ago
My kid’s no longer on roblox. We originally locked the account down to try and keep her safe. With commuication off and the account limited to only th Roblox verified games we thought we were okay. It turns out that even in those games there’s usually an ability to change a “nickname” which allows users to chat by just updating their nickname. As a dev I know how straight forward it would be to stop this frok happening. Upon discovering the problem I contacted Roblox support and we pulled the kid out of Roblox. Fyi; roblox support is not good, when the problem relates to child safety they pull all the classic tricks to make it seem like a “you” problem. They blame the third party “experience” developer, despite the game being vouched for by roblox. They close tickets after a short period with no response. They also treat this widespread issue (using nicknames to chat) as an individual breach of ts & cs, rather than fixing thr problem. Blaming the end user, who’s usually younger than 12. Given the age of my and other kids I’d assume they’re violating GDPR & other global data protection laws on a regular basis.
- Delphiza 4y ago
  That is shocking! It is an 'unknown unknown' thing that as parents we would be totally unaware of, but will somehow be communicated in game, or in hundreds of hours of youtube videos that kids watch. You think that it is all locked down, but can never be sure. Also, as a company Roblox is evidentially a bad actor. I would rather trust Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony parental controls. Not that they are perfect, and don't make mistakes, but their business models don't run on whatever Roblox Inc does.

485 points by memorable 4y ago

Cerium 4y ago
Are you suggesting that the situation has materially changed in the last five months? Perhaps you have some detail to share?

Some of this blog post is over-reaching, which is a shame because the clear and significant problems need absolutely no embellishment.

bri3d 4y ago
This - definitely, any platform with a userbase that's substantially comprised of children and which offers free communication is going to be a complete disaster requiring ridiculous amounts of moderation and careful parental involvement. It is clear that Roblox have failed to deliver the moderation capabilities necessary to market their platform as "safe," and are more interested in making money. But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything? And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all. This essay, and this substack in general, really lack focus - they publish dramatic exposés which are just a hodgepodge of random "dirt" thrown together, some interesting and serious and mostly nothing.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all. Half-baked? It's enough if casino sites exist for a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws.
  - bri3d 4y ago
    This is skin gambling, where in-game items are wagered by proxy, so the actual structure of the gambling is unfortunately somewhat nuanced. I agree that it's unethical and Roblox failing to crack down on these sites by any means they can, again, represents a failing. But I'd have liked to see a separate post with a deeper investigation into how the gambling sites are structured, and how the cash-out economy works. Proxy-gambling using skins and secondary markets has been highly controversial since at least the CS:GO days and unfortunately it _isn't_ that clear that there's a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws on the part of Roblox. Valve have been somewhat successful so far in defending themselves against the Washington gaming commission and many lawsuits surrounding CS:GO skin gambling. But, Roblox have a direct cash-out program for in-game content developers which may change their situation. I'd again, have loved to seen this investigated more in another blog post. This one was weirdly unfocused to me because it started with serious, well-founded allegations of inadequate moderation leading to harm to children, in contrast to "safe" marketing. Then it progressed to a random aside accusing a safety officer of being a furry (???). And then flipped to another aside about finding a gambling site.
    - philistine 4y ago
      Watch the people make games videos about Roblox. That will answer all your questions about it’s operations.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything? It's one thing to watch/engage with this stuff privately in your personal life. It's quite another thing to have: >> Roblox’s former social media manager ran a public pornographic blog with “furry porn” and photos of himself And >> Roblox’s official verified Twitter account retweeted content from “DukeButDuke” with #FanArtFriday. This is not > jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows This is Roblox's public representatives at a high level in the company publicly promoting this stuff. Put another way, if you posted a blog article about furry porn and pictures of yourself nude, then prominently displayed it next to your public work profile, do you honestly think that your company would have no right to fire you? There's a reason lots of bloggers that work for big companies will put "this blog and these ideas have no affiliation with company X" disclaimers everywhere, and that's just for semi controversial blogging topics.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

chris_wot 4y ago

If this is true, I think I'll talk to my boss tomorrow about getting Roblox banned on our student systems.

lostlogin 4y ago
A brief Google suggests the problems aren’t new and are very prevalent.
shagie 4y ago
I'd suggest watching these to help inform your decision and conversation: Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers -- https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. -- https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
zaptrem 4y ago
Similar issues have existed on lightly or unmoderated online games since the dawn of time. Would you support banning Minecraft for the same reason? I think games that encourage technical and creative thinking stand to benefit more than they harm. They absolutely require closer parental supervision, though. Moreover, the developers at this company need to crack down on pedos both from without and (according to the article) within.
concordDance 4y ago
Try understanding the scale of Roblox first before thinking of anecdotes as relevant. Unless you're also terrified of cardiologists? [1] [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
charcircuit 4y ago
You might as well ban the internet too. And all phones. While you are at it make them where a gag when traveling between home and school to prevent them from talking to strangers.
- 4y ago

adamrezich 4y ago

who could've foreseen that a microtransaction-based multiplayer user-generated content platform designed for children (with the ability to cash out in-game currency to real money(?!)) could've led to these sorts of problems

mrits 4y ago

The internet, social media, boy scouts, relatives, and everything else has these problems. It is why kids need parents.

mschuster91 4y ago
Yes indeed, but at least some of the acts described in the blog post would land "normal", non-stock-listed forum operators in front of a court: aiding gambling activity and child abuse are serious crimes. There are numerous laws that detail the responsibilities of operating anything on the Internet that is targeted towards children, and Roblox seems to be completely ignoring these. Not to mention they are ignoring their moral responsibility of protecting their underage users. Roblox needs to shut down Robux redeeming immediately and prevent any kind of interaction where one account has not been verified to be of age and accounts that have been verified, and maybe allow interactions between close age groups. It's not that hard to do so.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Robux redeeming is how the people actually developing content for Roblox get paid.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    They have to find a different way then that does not allow pedophiles and gambling dens to flourish. Not my problem how they want to do this.
softwaredoug 4y ago
There are some specific structures and incentives that create situations that make it easy to groom children. We can work to correct those. For example Scouts relies (desperately) on volunteers. So unfortunately the “trusted adult” is perhaps sometime TOO interested in volunteering. And the Scout group sadly doesn’t think deeply enough cause they’re just happy to have a parent volunteer. You can see how this can create a dynamic that attracts the wrong kind of person that want to groom families to prey on children.

14 4y ago

My young son started telling me about his friend from Florida that he started talking to. I am from Canada and across the country so questioned if the person he was talking to was a real child or some pedophile. Thankfully he video called her soon after and it was another 10year old girl and they just liked to play online but it definitely worries and and I’m not sure how Roblox can tackle the issue.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Get them a nintendo switch or Steam Deck. Roblox teaches kids about being exploited by scrip.
roca 4y ago
It won't be long before paedophiles can produce video avatars of themselves as children. In fact they might already be able to do that.
- rtev 4y ago
  It’s already possible to do this in real-time

eptcyka 4y ago

Whilst the issues raised are serious and I don't want to detract from the severity of the allegations, but I really take issue with putting regular porn and furry porn in the same league as pedophilia.

deleted 4y ago
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pizzathyme 4y ago
If the regular porn and furry porn are being shared with children, it is very serious
- eptcyka 4y ago
  I agree, but then the issue is child abuse and should be clearly stated as such. Making vague remarks about someone's personal twitter account isn't that.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    It's one thing if some random employee doesn't take care about a social media account that can trivially be associated with their company. But high-ranked executives, particularly in sensitive departments?! JFC it's not that hard to create an anonymous account on any social media site except Facebook.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  But they aren't and the article doesn't suggest they are.
throwaway5959 4y ago
Expect both to be banned or at least the idea brought up the next time Republicans are in power. Edit: you can downvote me all you want but all you have to do is look at MTG’s Twitter profile to see what I’m talking about. For instance: https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-sec-230-2657233040 https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-sec-230-2657233040

Delphiza 4y ago

Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents. It _seems_ to have controls, and _seems_ to restrict bad behaviour, but it does not, and cannot. My daughter was roped into an online paedophile ring when she was 12. The initial contacts and grooming were made through Roblox... almost right under our noses. Every time we, as parents, looked at what she was doing, it seemed okay. We could have dug deeper, but did not. Luckily we caught it before it progressed too far, but some damage was done. Wherever you can, tell parents to flat-out block Roblox. Edit: Because people are asking how it works. Roblox is a lot about bragging rights for individuals. You gain skins, trade for rare items, buy Robux for real money that can be used to buy items. Players flock around those that that have rare or expensive items. My daughter had a "super super happy face". I just googled, and it is current selling for $350. It makes them feel wanted and important. So just like fornite and skins in other games. The groomers feed the celebrity, sense of community and so on to engage in chat. It starts as in-game chat, which you can never see the history of, before moving to DMs. The chat has tricks to get around removed words, so they all communicate in some sort of code that they all pick up along the way. Then they are able to divert them to other platforms where there are fewer controls. My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. Then they follow up on other platform calls (or phone calls) and follow the usual grooming techniques. The trick is to identify the marks by how they behave in the game, and in the more popular, and social ones, I think that it is quite easy (in retrospect).

pizzathyme 4y ago
It sounds like they are completely failing to scale their moderation teams with their platform. This is extremely dangerous and causes real harm. They need funded ML engineers, human reviewers, policy experts, product engineers, data scientists, and the will to protect people. Like any massive social network this is a moral imperative. I don’t know what the current state is of their roadmap but I hope for everyone’s sake that they get their act together quickly.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  Honestly I don’t think there’s a single mega-platform which hasn’t failed to scale their moderation team.

jrockway 4y ago

I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum amount of communication two strangers can have on the Internet. You can choose 6 pre-made things to say to your opponent; Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten. This might be too much; I have definitely seen people get mad from their opponent using the voice lines too much. My thought is that this significantly reduces the richness of the in-game interactions (implies less engagement, implies less revenue), but doesn't need moderators to keep the game from being used for illegal sexual encounters, which is nice if your game targets kids.

Semaphor 4y ago
> This might be too much Back when I played (early days), the common thing was indeed to mute opponents right when the game starts.
acoard 4y ago
Yes, essentially communication is a tool and any tool in a multiplayer game will be abused. Without playing any multiplayer Hearthstone, I can guarantee that some people would use "Well Played" after a mistake to insult players. Just like how in Rocket League people spam "What a save!" after an embarrassing miss. I totally agree that it removes the richness. You lose out on any meaningful, even if small or quaint, connections, and might as well be interacting with an AI that triggers a "Well played!" at the end of the game. There's no right answer here, it's an intractable problem since the beginning of the internet. It reminds me of the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog a bit. The problem is human nature projected into the internet. > A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "It is in my nature."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
- 4y ago

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Good, there is a special place in silicon hell for those marketing the idea of scrip to kids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip This company has a lot of bad karma to settle, and their profit model is unsustainable.

vorpalhex 4y ago

Letting your child talk to strangers on the internet may not be the best idea. News at 11. No moderation system is flawless. If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content. I do find the digging in to the personal lives of the employees here pretty bad taste. Yes an adult can look at porn and have sexual relationships with other adults, whether they work at Roblox or Toys R Us.

conductr 4y ago
> If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content. Problem with this is kids are sneaky, curious and liars.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  Maybe be straight up with them instead of "shielding" them so they're not curious anymore. As a European I find American culture extremely prude. And anything that's "forbidden" is automatically interesting. For some reason I genuinely don't understand however, most people prefer ignoring these kinds of factors of human nature and just keep forcing their values and norms when it's clearly not working.
  - engineeringwoke 4y ago
    It’s so absurd. They call their children sneaky liars in the Anglo-sphere and then never tell them the truth in a silly attempt to “protect” their innocence. Of course they are sneaky liars?
    - conductr 4y ago
      Not sure if this is pointed at me since I made the sneaky liar comment from my Anglo-sphere but I never once suggested to dodge telling them the truth. In fact, I’d combine telling them the truth with “that’s why we don’t talk to strangers online” whereas the quote I mentioned was about “if you’re going to allow them to talk to strangers online”. That shouldn’t be an option for kids this age. You have to do more than talk with them. You have to monitor them. You have to know what their doing. You have to accept that you still might not get throw, because they’re sneaky liars and if they want to break a rule they will. That’s what kids do. These kids at this age can also be curious about sex. Do you have actual parental experience that counters any of this because it seems you have strong opinions on how to parent? Also it sounds like you’re taking it personal as if I’m name calling the kids. That means you’re definitely lacking parental experience because it’s a simple fact that every kid is sneaky and lies albeit to various degrees.

deleted 4y ago

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tristor 4y ago

One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned. It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of the revenue comes from "whales", users that buy large quantities. In a game targeted at children, who themselves don't have income/credit cards, it's unlikely that the "whales" are in the target demographic. Rather, it is likely most of the "whales" are adults who are spending large in order to use the in-game currency to exploit interactions with others. Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing their business model. Their business model is essentially structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children over mobile platforms. On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even worse. It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the same way.

1234letshaveatw 4y ago
I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens (and their parents)
- tristor 4y ago
  $2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.

concordDance 4y ago

This kind of insinuating nonsense is the worst of gutter journalism. An employee ran a pornographic blog? Their twitter retweeted something a pedophile made? The head of content moderation is a furry? So what?! This guilt by association nonsense is the law of contagion! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion

nr2x 4y ago
This isn’t some low level SWE with an unusual hobby, it’s the person whom this company is putting out as the reason parents should trust the product. It’s absolutely idiotic on a number of levels.
sosodev 4y ago
Do you really think it's okay for a kids game to promote an artist that openly admits to being pedophile?
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I think I don't believe anyone who just lumps furry porn, cartoon images of childlike anime, and paedophilia together. I auto-dismiss them. Especially when finding the furry porn required an investigation into catching said person's non-work Twitter that was named pseudonymously. You guys over-index on this nonsense because outrage is a drug injected directly into your brain. There's enough wrong about this platform that could be improved, but you're all more interested in just raging online and so you must invent this whole Axis-of-Evil. This, coming from someone whose sexual interests are pretty damned vanilla.
jstarfish 4y ago
If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children to. Period. The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate. All of this is literally intuition, but we're being trained over time to ignore it in the name of sex-positivity and other nonsense. It's just grooming redefined.

smiddereens 4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago

Disney Toontown solved this problem 20 years ago. You give people a pre-populated list of things they can say, and that's it. There's literally no other way to protect kids on these services.

midwestemo 4y ago
I played Roblox in the past (like 2012?) and it did have one called Safe Chat. It got removed in 2014 according to here. https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/In-experience_chat#Filtering https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/In-experience_chat#Filtering
- bioemerl 4y ago
  The wiki says it was replaced by a tool that kicks on for everyone under 13 that only lets them use words from a very specific whitelist. If they don't do this already they need to divide the player bases. Want to play in the <13 rooms? You have to use the same word whitelist they have.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
And hows Toontown doing now? There is a reason Roblox enables chat. It increases their engagement.

twawaaay 4y ago

My kids play Minecraft but they are not allowed to join servers with strangers. I set up some servers where they have freedom to do what they want but the only people they are allowed to play with are their friends from school and family.

duxup 4y ago

There's a lot of "so and so did bad things" and "Roblox terminated his account". Maybe they should be faster but I wonder if ultimately the solution that some folks would want is just no communication for kids apps ... I've got mixed feelings about that.

fabianhjr 4y ago

There are two video investigations from People Make Games into economic aspects of Roblox in particular child labor/exploitation and monopolistic aspirations via platform capitalism. 1. Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ ) 2. Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY )

libraryatnight 4y ago

Roblox is a cesspool. It's like 4chan ran a games platform.

pokoleo 4y ago

I once interned at an easily google-able Secondlife competitor. They fought against NSFW content for a long time, but then figured out how to fix it by: 1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW content, and 2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase) This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt with the NSFW content in one swoop.

happyopossum 4y ago
A) I don’t think #2 would be A good idea for a kids game, and B) kids will absolutely start to game #1 with shill accounts and you may well wind up increasing the amount of ‘evil stuff’ as kids bring it to the platform for the sole purpose of reporting it to get Robux/swag.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  AKA The Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
zkldi 4y ago
Sounds like it'd just incentivise people to make NSFW content on burners and then report it.

zac23or 4y ago

Wow, Roblox has text/voice chat! I've worked on a comment system before, it's basically impossible to block bad behavior using filters, AI, whatever, users find a loophole and continue with the behavior. Mods are super needed. Text/voice chat + real money. It's a pedophile's paradise.

donkarma 4y ago

Roblox is extremely predatory outside of child grooming scenarios as well due to the fact that every game includes dark patterns in order to get them to spend money in order to progress because they won't get moderated. I imagine it would cause addictive behaviour.

ajb 4y ago

So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort. I wonder if there is an opportunity here to get a fully distributed effort going, based on web of trust. Most users don't do web of trust verification even in apps which support it, like signal, because it's not worth the effort for general low stakes communication. But people are willing to put in a lot of effort to keep their kids safe. And the requirement here: "I want my kids only to message adults I trust, or kids that an adult I trust has verified are kids" is a good match for web of trust, because it's basically an emulation of how the mark 1 meatspace method of doing it worked. (yes, my use case here is for younger kids, older ones should be able to explore more and I haven't figured out how that would work).

larrik 4y ago
> So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort. As a parent dealing with some of this currently, this isn't entirely how I'd put it. Roblox is marketed for kids, and claims to have a large number of parental controls, but in fact they either don't work or don't exist. Most parents aren't savvy enough to know they even need to check for that. Meanwhile, I'm extremely computer literate (a developer even), and have largely banned my kids from the internet, installed multiple blockers and monitors, and my kid still gets to shady places and content. It's f-ing impossible unless you are going to literally watch over their shoulder the whole time, which is wildly unrealistic and frankly immoral once they reach a certain age. It's exasperating.
- operator-name 4y ago
  The curiosity for the forbidden/unknown is a powerful motivator for children. Destroying that magic by personally becoming invested can be quite effective. The same applies for things that are "cool" or whatever the current term is. Either you become part of the "in group" and earn some of your child's respect or whatever you touch no longer becomes corrupted by your "boomer energy". Both are a win and far more effective than the cat and mouse game of training them to be mini pen-testers.

imglorp 4y ago

Is no one talking about the valuation? OP says $38B, looks like about $20B today down from $60B in December [1]. Is this all potential upside from their token and service fees, or what? 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RBLX/key-statistics https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RBLX/key-statistics

alexk307 4y ago

Shocked to hear the responses on here. This is disgusting, regardless of the blogs writing style or your opinion on furry porn, some of the allegations are pretty gross. If your platform aims to attract children as their primary user base, this crap should not be happening as often as it does on their platform.

deleted 4y ago

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amatecha 4y ago

My thought: online games which children are playing, especially ~13 and younger, should NEVER have text chat typed on a keyboard. They should only allow symbolic communication like "emotes" and symbols, abstract and basic stuff. Moderation teams can not possibly ever keep up with the "arms race" of determined scammers and exploitative individuals. Just eliminate the entire class of problems upfront at the design stage. Save your company tons of money, too, both in staffing and in legal settlements.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
To Roblox's credit, they do take the "Club Penguin" approach: If you're under 13, you can only chat from a drop-down of chat options, and can only see messages sent using that functionality. Now, that doesn't stop kids from lying about their age when registering, but that's another can of worms.
engineeringwoke 4y ago
When do you let them grow up then? Or is it more about controlling your children than helping them?

nights192 4y ago

I admit I find the ferverent vociferations against ROBLOX as an entity somewhat disheartening; the game was cynosure to my childhood, providing precious experience to me in learning how to navigate social situations and cope with the rammifications thereof. Pedophiles did, and do, exist, but this is a fact of life in any manner of social media or large community; discussing frankly how malevolent some may be is imperative, even if it does not preempt all danger posed. The alternative, stifling all manners of creative expression available to those who may otherwise be socially shunted, is untenable to me, as it does not line up with what my experience growing up using this technology taught me. Nothing in life is without risk--exposure to this risk over a platform that's online, somewhat discoverable, and insulated is vastly preferable to keeping your kids blissful and unknowing of what would threaten them. Please do not attempt to parent in such a way that motivates your children to hide things from you and cut you out of the loop entirely.

warent 4y ago

As for the weird rapey song, it actually originates from a youtube channel that makes comedy videos. It's based on a creepy/horror game called Baldi's Basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo Obviously very NSFW In context, the song is just adult humor. But, yeah, definitely does not belong in a children's game.

mock-possum 4y ago
the video they link is misleading too, it misquotes / mishears the lyrics, despite the fact that the actual lyrics are easily googleable... there's a lot about this article that needlessly misses the mark, it's annoying.

roca 4y ago

Welcome to the metaverse.

ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago

Roblox must die, the monster that eats children.

Jtothe5 4y ago

Old news people. This pops up every time the short sellers are on the prowl.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t quite understand what produces the value of these Roblox items? As far as I’ve seen anyone can download the toolkit and build their favorite hat.

lampshades 4y ago

Welp. I guess my kids won't be playing with that.

Gatsky 4y ago

Is there a for-profit venture targeted at children which isn't harmful? Book publishing I guess. Struggling to think of others.

flerovium 4y ago
The authors, who pay the bulk of the labor costs, aren't usually motivated by the money.

jkfdsjklfdjksla 4y ago

There is no good reason for kids to have tablets and smartphones, and parents who give those devices to their kids are bad parents. Those parents also make it hard or impossible to make that choice myself as a parent, because I also don't want my kids to be the odd ones out or social pariahs. There is also practically no good reason for adults to own such things, as they are designed to fritter away your attention on the cheapest content possible (generally old, re-hashed "community generated" content). In my opinion.

ilikeitdark 4y ago

Sadly my nine year old daughter is addicted, and have trying "soft" measures to get her away from it (like buying a Switch and Animal Crossing) but all her friends are on Roblox. Has anyone seen any good videos for kids that explain the negatives of Roblox, and tried any successful methods with their children?

flerovium 4y ago
This is the real problem.

jamescodesthing 4y ago

My kid’s no longer on roblox. We originally locked the account down to try and keep her safe. With commuication off and the account limited to only th Roblox verified games we thought we were okay. It turns out that even in those games there’s usually an ability to change a “nickname” which allows users to chat by just updating their nickname. As a dev I know how straight forward it would be to stop this frok happening. Upon discovering the problem I contacted Roblox support and we pulled the kid out of Roblox. Fyi; roblox support is not good, when the problem relates to child safety they pull all the classic tricks to make it seem like a “you” problem. They blame the third party “experience” developer, despite the game being vouched for by roblox. They close tickets after a short period with no response. They also treat this widespread issue (using nicknames to chat) as an individual breach of ts & cs, rather than fixing thr problem. Blaming the end user, who’s usually younger than 12. Given the age of my and other kids I’d assume they’re violating GDPR & other global data protection laws on a regular basis.

Delphiza 4y ago
That is shocking! It is an 'unknown unknown' thing that as parents we would be totally unaware of, but will somehow be communicated in game, or in hundreds of hours of youtube videos that kids watch. You think that it is all locked down, but can never be sure. Also, as a company Roblox is evidentially a bad actor. I would rather trust Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony parental controls. Not that they are perfect, and don't make mistakes, but their business models don't run on whatever Roblox Inc does.