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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

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.
  - treis 4y ago
    There's also probably not a single mega-platform that cares even a little bit about abuse. At least not to the extent of paying any growth or revenue cost to prevent abuse.
    - RGamma 4y ago
      It's the age old tale of society paying the cost because it has to.
  - mike00632 4y ago
    Actually, TikTok seems to do a good job. They understand they have a lot of children on the app and they take that very seriously as a responsibility. Unfortunately their solution is over-the-top censorship but it works better than other platforms from what I've seen. They used to have a "no politics" policy where TikTok simply wasn't a place for politics. They scale moderation by simply over-moderating and that is in line with their offering of a curated feed as opposed to a "platform" for arbitrary content delivery.
    - crummy 4y ago
      There's still plenty of people unhappy with it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackout-challenge-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackou...
    - amalter 4y ago
      No politics? My fyp highly disagrees. However, the algorithm is amazingly good at keeping you in your political in-group. You'll often hear content creators talk about "getting on the wrong side of TikTok" - meaning they started getting recommended to an out-group. (For example super cool super funny @melissadilkoateras ending up in MAGA feeds occasionally). Cue brigading of reports, community violations, etc until the audience stabilizes. I think the reputation is due to the zealous take down policy and the solid profiling that keeps you in your comfortable content window.
peppertree 4y ago
When you have a known hangout place for children, anonymous chat, and a corporation with the financial means to suppress bad press. It's just a recipe for abuse.
quornxypt 4y ago
Can you give more info on this so I know what to look out for?
- peppertree 4y ago
  Speaking as a parent, I try not to snoop on my children's conversions. If they find out you are snooping they will get very creative at hiding it. The most important thing is to know who they are interacting with and get to know their parents.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I think this depends on your children's age. If your kids are reasonable 15+, then sure. You shouldn't be spying on them. If your kids are 12? Then you probably should be. This is less about spying or snooping and more about knowing children aren't mature enough to have private conversations with strangers.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      Meanwhile I was doing full RP at 13. I think people forget how mature children actually are.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        At 12 or 13, I was being dropped off at the basement apartment of some creepy old dude who ran an Atari BBS and held open houses for the most engaged members. From everything I saw/noticed, it was 100.0% on the up and up, but as a parent of kids that age now, the thought horrifies me.
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        I think most of the time unsupervised children will be fine online. Sometimes they will get hurt, and perhaps very seriously hurt, by being unsupervised online. Supervising your kid online is like putting them in a car seat even though you're unlikely to get in a crash. It's appropriate when they're young and becomes inappropriate as they get older.
mysterydip 4y ago
Are you able to go into more detail? I avoided roblox for my daughter as long as I could, but her cousins stopped playing minecraft with her, going exclusively to roblox. The inertia was eventually too much. I've limited her to a couple experiences and to only talk to her cousins, but I don't really see much control otherwise.
- bombcar 4y ago
  One thing I'd do is play as her character at times - the cousins should know you do it, and she should (hopefully) be fine with you grinding whatever it is Roblox's have. Anything untoward should also occur to you whilst playing. And be completely open and upfront about the dangers, and how the "scams" work.
  - Delphiza 4y ago
    I don't think that you can play as a child character because you won't know what kids do, never mind understanding the actual game. It is how they interact with each other that is will be foreign to adult non-players. It is like, as an adult, trying to sit down and have a barbie tea party. After 30 seconds you're done and wonder how on earth it can keep a child occupied half an hour.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    I think this is likely the best way to go about it, but offer some sort of reward for their transparency such as helping them achieve in-game goals, and maybe rewarding them for out of game accomplishments (good grades, cleaning dishes, putting away clothes, etc) with in-game rewards you normally pay for. At least then it's not some creepy old man asking for inappropriate things in exchange for a in-game reward. Also make it clear, that you're worried about other players doing bad things to her that she might not realize is insanely bad. When I first would use the internet, my mom freaked out one of my friends typed a little too fast, I don't know if my mom was right or wrong, I don't know how much faster I would of typed at the same age had I had a computer for a few years more, but she was like nope. Block them. So I did.
causality0 4y ago
I'm not surprised. You could essentially build a bot to locate victims of child pornography/grooming by scraping the internet to find anywhere a roblox profile link appears next to a tiktok or Twitter bio link.
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  Please do it.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  How is having a Roblox account listed alongside a Tiktok/Twitter account an indicator of CSA? I'd expect this to be a dragnet of all Roblox players who are 16+ and most likely to be legitimately engaged in networking/social media. If you really want to find the CSAs, I'd suggest looking for the accounts openly soliciting vague "donations," and links to Amazon wishlists. Still a bit noisy (e-begging is not inherently e-whoring, but there is significant overlap). Outliers might include links to P2P payment sites (Coffee, Paypal, Patreon, GFM, etc. Assume BTC these days too) but in general kids have limited banking mobility, and large sums of money discovered by parents erroneously attract drug trafficking suspicions-- whereas material items draw no legal attention, can be anonymously delivered by Amazon, and can be successfully attributed to "friends." Also, be suspicious of your kids' friends-- even IRL ones. The only thing more deplorable than a pedophile's own grooming efforts are when they manage to turn their victims into recruiters. The trust is already there on account of a proxy. All it takes is a scenario along the lines of "your dad won't buy you an iPad? I have a friend online who will..." and the rest is history.
  - causality0 4y ago
    I suppose you could denoise it by starting from every Twitter and tiktok profile linked on reddit or a *chan site and checking to see if there's a roblox link on that profile.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nr2x 4y ago
So sorry this happened to you, very troubling as a parent.
macspoofing 4y ago
I guess the only way to 'fix' this kind of stuff is to go down the Nintendo route of highly restricted multiplayer interaction (friend-codes, no chat, etc.). And they probably will have to do that. Once the media and especially regulators get them in their sights (as COPPA violation in the US), Roblox will play ball real quick.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 4y ago
That's horrible, I'm sorry that your daughter and your family had to experience this :(
ipv6ipv4 4y ago
A somewhat contrarian view. I've always viewed Roblox suspiciously. However, at the same time, I believe it is fairly harmless as long as your child remains in the confines of Roblox and isn't lured into other social networks like Instagram, Snapchat or similar which I think can be effectively monitored and restricted. I think that the big advantage of Roblox is that just like it is a decent game sandbox, it is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world, the risks and how to mitigate them (good passwords, never share your passwords, don't tell random strangers private information like your name, etc.). Assuming, I can prevent them from getting lured into other social networks, the worst that can happen is that they lose their Roblox account when they make an inevitable mistake. In my view, it's better that they learn these lessons in Roblox, at an early age, rather than later with social accounts or, worse, financial accounts. Roblox' problems can be a useful educational tool.
- adbachman 4y ago
  You just replied to an actual experience of predatory behavior with the statement, "it is fairly harmless". > "It is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world" It's not, though. That's the point of this article and the comment you replied to. Again and again, it is _not_ a safe sandbox for learning. You don't prepare children for the world by handing them off to predators with a "we tried" level of safety in place, you do it by removing the predators.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Or teach your kids how to avoid the predators, since predators will always be around. I don't agree that the best course of action is to shield your children from every negative consequence of the world. But I guess I shouldn't be speaking as someone who doesn't have a kid. (We've been trying, and hopefully IVF will work.) But I do have a lot of second-hand experience with nieces and family friends. Maturity level varies dramatically between kids, and it seems like a mistake to take a one-size-fits-all "Internet is scary" approach to parenting. Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends. If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.
geraldwhen 4y ago
I played Roblox with my kids for one day before we had to nix it. Even with chat disabled, most “experiences” are barely even games. We play real games now, or occasionally Minecraft mods. The frozen Minecraft adventure mod is quite fun
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  There are a lot of very good, enjoyable games on Roblox. Bloxburg and Bee Swarm Simulator are two fun ones. There are also lots of horrible games on Roblox. Much like all the mobile app stores, you have to look hard and talk to friends to find good stuff.
- iasay 4y ago
  Wait until they work out how build sheep fucking machines in Minecraft! As for Roblox I watch with one eye open and educate them. It's a great environment to learn distrust for others, particularly in Adopt Me. They learned how to not get scammed fairly quickly.
thom 4y ago
This sounds horrible and I'm sorry for what's happened to your family. When you say Roblox _seems_ to have controls, do you mean that disabling chat doesn't actually work? Because I've tried to lock my kids accounts down as much as possible and had convinced myself it was mostly harmless.
- Delphiza 4y ago
  It was two years ago, so maybe things have changed a bit. I don't think the game works well without the in-game chat stream. If that can be disabled then perhaps some of the risk is gone. It is still a creepy place with a lot of 'dating' in the game. My daughter was also introduced to the concept of a furry very young. She though it was more innocent than it actually was. Roblox is disabled on the firewall. It will never be accessed again. She still plays games that are fairly locked down on xbox, and I trust the parental controls of Microsoft more than Roblox. I also put in a gryphon router to help take some of the load of us, as parents, policing everything.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    What is a gryphon router (parent asking)
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      Judging from their website, a router with parental controls.
moomin 4y ago
My kid plays Roblox. I disabled chat on it years ago (I spotted something and was 100% not having it.). She's still asking for it to be re-enabled and I'm still "thinking about it".
- grog454 4y ago
  Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them? These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit trust, for example schools.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Not the original parent, but because you are tasking a literal child to have the ability to be able to understand extreme social nuance with an already limited understanding of social situations. Children should be made aware of some of these dangers, but overall, most children won't have the psychological or social tools to be able to properly handle these issues, especially when the in-universe rewards are so massive (fame and popularity in Robolox is something children really crave, a sense of belonging is pretty core to human psychology). From my perspective, it's all around healthier to disengage in the platforms that enable such toxic behaviors to take place, especially when the platform creators are fiscally incentivized to turn a blind eye.
    - darkerside 4y ago
      Children aren't stupid. Or at least they can be made less stupid by teaching them. They are surprisingly perceptive, and by the time they can chat online, they have little trouble with social nuance in my experience.
      - danielheath 4y ago
        It's not a question of intellect; adolescents are emotionally undeveloped. It's extremely straightforward for a manipulative adult to find an emotion they are struggling with and offer them comfort. This is obviously easier to do with kids that aren't getting the support they need at home, but it's still not that hard to do with those that are thriving.
RHSeeger 4y ago
Honestly, I think any online platform that has chat that children can be a part of it going to encounter the same issues. You can do your best to protect and educate them. You can talk to them about what they're playing; get involved so you are more likely to notice issues. But there's always going to be risks. It's scary, but I don't think locking everything risky away from a child is the right route either. I tend to think of it like letting your child go to the park with friends. The risks are different, but the concept is the same; the only way to really remove the risk is to be watching them every second, which isn't overly realistic.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  I don't know if the comparison really applies. In the real world, children can look out for each other, adults in the community can keep an eye. Sure, parks and things will be targets for sickos, but online games like roblox or social media like discord basically have giant billboards on them. There's no real way to police the behavior online like there is in real life.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    I wasn't comparing the types of risk involved in each. Rather, I was saying that both things have risks, and there are things we can do to reduce/mitigate that risk, but there's no reasonable way to remove the risk completely.
    - betwixthewires 4y ago
      There is a reasonable way to remove the risk completely with roblox and discord: prevent your children from using them. In fact, it is the only way to even mitigate the risks at all, shy of helicopter parenting.
      - RHSeeger 4y ago
        That's like saying there is a reasonable way to avoid the dangers of going to the park; by going to a different park. There will always be online dangers, and "don't go online" is not a viable strategy to avoid them. From what I've seen, Robolox doesn't appear to be worse than other social platforms. Discord can be worse because it's really _not_ intended for children nor does it seem they put any effort into protecting children.
mey 4y ago
As an outsider to Roblox I found https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ insightful, as well as it's follow-up video https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
- jv22222 4y ago
  Holy crap, every parent needs to watch these videos end-to-end. Roblox is predatory platform in so many ways.
aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
> My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. I'm missing a step, here....and I suspect a few others are as well.
Jistern 4y ago
standardUser 4y ago
It's likely less dangerous on aggregate than an AOL chatroom or the Catholic church. I'm certainly sorry for your horrific experiences and I am all for vastly stronger regulations for anything marketed to children. But abandoning an entire ecosystem because it can be used for evil ends is just not a sustainable approach to life. We'd be left with nothing. Maybe Roblox is a unique and exceptional evil that requires a more severe solution? But more likely, it's just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not.
- mmazing 4y ago
  I've played many many hours of Roblox with my nephew, and I've yet to encounter anything close to what this article is talking about. I rarely talk in that game, so I'm essentially indistinguishable from a child to any predators. I've heard plenty of inappropriate language (almost exclusively simple cursing), but that's about it. I don't want to discount the content of this article, but I agree that it's more likely "just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not."
- youerabigot 4y ago

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.
- treis 4y ago
  There's also probably not a single mega-platform that cares even a little bit about abuse. At least not to the extent of paying any growth or revenue cost to prevent abuse.
  - RGamma 4y ago
    It's the age old tale of society paying the cost because it has to.
- mike00632 4y ago
  Actually, TikTok seems to do a good job. They understand they have a lot of children on the app and they take that very seriously as a responsibility. Unfortunately their solution is over-the-top censorship but it works better than other platforms from what I've seen. They used to have a "no politics" policy where TikTok simply wasn't a place for politics. They scale moderation by simply over-moderating and that is in line with their offering of a curated feed as opposed to a "platform" for arbitrary content delivery.
  - crummy 4y ago
    There's still plenty of people unhappy with it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackout-challenge-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackou...
  - amalter 4y ago
    No politics? My fyp highly disagrees. However, the algorithm is amazingly good at keeping you in your political in-group. You'll often hear content creators talk about "getting on the wrong side of TikTok" - meaning they started getting recommended to an out-group. (For example super cool super funny @melissadilkoateras ending up in MAGA feeds occasionally). Cue brigading of reports, community violations, etc until the audience stabilizes. I think the reputation is due to the zealous take down policy and the solid profiling that keeps you in your comfortable content window.

peppertree 4y ago

When you have a known hangout place for children, anonymous chat, and a corporation with the financial means to suppress bad press. It's just a recipe for abuse.

quornxypt 4y ago

Can you give more info on this so I know what to look out for?

peppertree 4y ago
Speaking as a parent, I try not to snoop on my children's conversions. If they find out you are snooping they will get very creative at hiding it. The most important thing is to know who they are interacting with and get to know their parents.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think this depends on your children's age. If your kids are reasonable 15+, then sure. You shouldn't be spying on them. If your kids are 12? Then you probably should be. This is less about spying or snooping and more about knowing children aren't mature enough to have private conversations with strangers.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Meanwhile I was doing full RP at 13. I think people forget how mature children actually are.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      At 12 or 13, I was being dropped off at the basement apartment of some creepy old dude who ran an Atari BBS and held open houses for the most engaged members. From everything I saw/noticed, it was 100.0% on the up and up, but as a parent of kids that age now, the thought horrifies me.
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      I think most of the time unsupervised children will be fine online. Sometimes they will get hurt, and perhaps very seriously hurt, by being unsupervised online. Supervising your kid online is like putting them in a car seat even though you're unlikely to get in a crash. It's appropriate when they're young and becomes inappropriate as they get older.

mysterydip 4y ago

Are you able to go into more detail? I avoided roblox for my daughter as long as I could, but her cousins stopped playing minecraft with her, going exclusively to roblox. The inertia was eventually too much. I've limited her to a couple experiences and to only talk to her cousins, but I don't really see much control otherwise.

bombcar 4y ago
One thing I'd do is play as her character at times - the cousins should know you do it, and she should (hopefully) be fine with you grinding whatever it is Roblox's have. Anything untoward should also occur to you whilst playing. And be completely open and upfront about the dangers, and how the "scams" work.
- Delphiza 4y ago
  I don't think that you can play as a child character because you won't know what kids do, never mind understanding the actual game. It is how they interact with each other that is will be foreign to adult non-players. It is like, as an adult, trying to sit down and have a barbie tea party. After 30 seconds you're done and wonder how on earth it can keep a child occupied half an hour.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I think this is likely the best way to go about it, but offer some sort of reward for their transparency such as helping them achieve in-game goals, and maybe rewarding them for out of game accomplishments (good grades, cleaning dishes, putting away clothes, etc) with in-game rewards you normally pay for. At least then it's not some creepy old man asking for inappropriate things in exchange for a in-game reward. Also make it clear, that you're worried about other players doing bad things to her that she might not realize is insanely bad. When I first would use the internet, my mom freaked out one of my friends typed a little too fast, I don't know if my mom was right or wrong, I don't know how much faster I would of typed at the same age had I had a computer for a few years more, but she was like nope. Block them. So I did.

causality0 4y ago

I'm not surprised. You could essentially build a bot to locate victims of child pornography/grooming by scraping the internet to find anywhere a roblox profile link appears next to a tiktok or Twitter bio link.

PenguinCoder 4y ago
Please do it.
jstarfish 4y ago
How is having a Roblox account listed alongside a Tiktok/Twitter account an indicator of CSA? I'd expect this to be a dragnet of all Roblox players who are 16+ and most likely to be legitimately engaged in networking/social media. If you really want to find the CSAs, I'd suggest looking for the accounts openly soliciting vague "donations," and links to Amazon wishlists. Still a bit noisy (e-begging is not inherently e-whoring, but there is significant overlap). Outliers might include links to P2P payment sites (Coffee, Paypal, Patreon, GFM, etc. Assume BTC these days too) but in general kids have limited banking mobility, and large sums of money discovered by parents erroneously attract drug trafficking suspicions-- whereas material items draw no legal attention, can be anonymously delivered by Amazon, and can be successfully attributed to "friends." Also, be suspicious of your kids' friends-- even IRL ones. The only thing more deplorable than a pedophile's own grooming efforts are when they manage to turn their victims into recruiters. The trust is already there on account of a proxy. All it takes is a scenario along the lines of "your dad won't buy you an iPad? I have a friend online who will..." and the rest is history.
- causality0 4y ago
  I suppose you could denoise it by starting from every Twitter and tiktok profile linked on reddit or a *chan site and checking to see if there's a roblox link on that profile.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nr2x 4y ago

So sorry this happened to you, very troubling as a parent.

macspoofing 4y ago

I guess the only way to 'fix' this kind of stuff is to go down the Nintendo route of highly restricted multiplayer interaction (friend-codes, no chat, etc.). And they probably will have to do that. Once the media and especially regulators get them in their sights (as COPPA violation in the US), Roblox will play ball real quick.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 4y ago

That's horrible, I'm sorry that your daughter and your family had to experience this :(

ipv6ipv4 4y ago

A somewhat contrarian view. I've always viewed Roblox suspiciously. However, at the same time, I believe it is fairly harmless as long as your child remains in the confines of Roblox and isn't lured into other social networks like Instagram, Snapchat or similar which I think can be effectively monitored and restricted. I think that the big advantage of Roblox is that just like it is a decent game sandbox, it is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world, the risks and how to mitigate them (good passwords, never share your passwords, don't tell random strangers private information like your name, etc.). Assuming, I can prevent them from getting lured into other social networks, the worst that can happen is that they lose their Roblox account when they make an inevitable mistake. In my view, it's better that they learn these lessons in Roblox, at an early age, rather than later with social accounts or, worse, financial accounts. Roblox' problems can be a useful educational tool.

adbachman 4y ago
You just replied to an actual experience of predatory behavior with the statement, "it is fairly harmless". > "It is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world" It's not, though. That's the point of this article and the comment you replied to. Again and again, it is _not_ a safe sandbox for learning. You don't prepare children for the world by handing them off to predators with a "we tried" level of safety in place, you do it by removing the predators.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Or teach your kids how to avoid the predators, since predators will always be around. I don't agree that the best course of action is to shield your children from every negative consequence of the world. But I guess I shouldn't be speaking as someone who doesn't have a kid. (We've been trying, and hopefully IVF will work.) But I do have a lot of second-hand experience with nieces and family friends. Maturity level varies dramatically between kids, and it seems like a mistake to take a one-size-fits-all "Internet is scary" approach to parenting. Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends. If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.

geraldwhen 4y ago

I played Roblox with my kids for one day before we had to nix it. Even with chat disabled, most “experiences” are barely even games. We play real games now, or occasionally Minecraft mods. The frozen Minecraft adventure mod is quite fun

RHSeeger 4y ago
There are a lot of very good, enjoyable games on Roblox. Bloxburg and Bee Swarm Simulator are two fun ones. There are also lots of horrible games on Roblox. Much like all the mobile app stores, you have to look hard and talk to friends to find good stuff.
iasay 4y ago
Wait until they work out how build sheep fucking machines in Minecraft! As for Roblox I watch with one eye open and educate them. It's a great environment to learn distrust for others, particularly in Adopt Me. They learned how to not get scammed fairly quickly.

thom 4y ago

This sounds horrible and I'm sorry for what's happened to your family. When you say Roblox _seems_ to have controls, do you mean that disabling chat doesn't actually work? Because I've tried to lock my kids accounts down as much as possible and had convinced myself it was mostly harmless.

Delphiza 4y ago
It was two years ago, so maybe things have changed a bit. I don't think the game works well without the in-game chat stream. If that can be disabled then perhaps some of the risk is gone. It is still a creepy place with a lot of 'dating' in the game. My daughter was also introduced to the concept of a furry very young. She though it was more innocent than it actually was. Roblox is disabled on the firewall. It will never be accessed again. She still plays games that are fairly locked down on xbox, and I trust the parental controls of Microsoft more than Roblox. I also put in a gryphon router to help take some of the load of us, as parents, policing everything.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  What is a gryphon router (parent asking)
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    Judging from their website, a router with parental controls.

moomin 4y ago

My kid plays Roblox. I disabled chat on it years ago (I spotted something and was 100% not having it.). She's still asking for it to be re-enabled and I'm still "thinking about it".

grog454 4y ago
Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them? These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit trust, for example schools.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Not the original parent, but because you are tasking a literal child to have the ability to be able to understand extreme social nuance with an already limited understanding of social situations. Children should be made aware of some of these dangers, but overall, most children won't have the psychological or social tools to be able to properly handle these issues, especially when the in-universe rewards are so massive (fame and popularity in Robolox is something children really crave, a sense of belonging is pretty core to human psychology). From my perspective, it's all around healthier to disengage in the platforms that enable such toxic behaviors to take place, especially when the platform creators are fiscally incentivized to turn a blind eye.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    Children aren't stupid. Or at least they can be made less stupid by teaching them. They are surprisingly perceptive, and by the time they can chat online, they have little trouble with social nuance in my experience.
    - danielheath 4y ago
      It's not a question of intellect; adolescents are emotionally undeveloped. It's extremely straightforward for a manipulative adult to find an emotion they are struggling with and offer them comfort. This is obviously easier to do with kids that aren't getting the support they need at home, but it's still not that hard to do with those that are thriving.

RHSeeger 4y ago

Honestly, I think any online platform that has chat that children can be a part of it going to encounter the same issues. You can do your best to protect and educate them. You can talk to them about what they're playing; get involved so you are more likely to notice issues. But there's always going to be risks. It's scary, but I don't think locking everything risky away from a child is the right route either. I tend to think of it like letting your child go to the park with friends. The risks are different, but the concept is the same; the only way to really remove the risk is to be watching them every second, which isn't overly realistic.

betwixthewires 4y ago
I don't know if the comparison really applies. In the real world, children can look out for each other, adults in the community can keep an eye. Sure, parks and things will be targets for sickos, but online games like roblox or social media like discord basically have giant billboards on them. There's no real way to police the behavior online like there is in real life.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  I wasn't comparing the types of risk involved in each. Rather, I was saying that both things have risks, and there are things we can do to reduce/mitigate that risk, but there's no reasonable way to remove the risk completely.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    There is a reasonable way to remove the risk completely with roblox and discord: prevent your children from using them. In fact, it is the only way to even mitigate the risks at all, shy of helicopter parenting.
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      That's like saying there is a reasonable way to avoid the dangers of going to the park; by going to a different park. There will always be online dangers, and "don't go online" is not a viable strategy to avoid them. From what I've seen, Robolox doesn't appear to be worse than other social platforms. Discord can be worse because it's really _not_ intended for children nor does it seem they put any effort into protecting children.

mey 4y ago

As an outsider to Roblox I found https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ insightful, as well as it's follow-up video https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

jv22222 4y ago
Holy crap, every parent needs to watch these videos end-to-end. Roblox is predatory platform in so many ways.

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago

> My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. I'm missing a step, here....and I suspect a few others are as well.

Jistern 4y ago

standardUser 4y ago

It's likely less dangerous on aggregate than an AOL chatroom or the Catholic church. I'm certainly sorry for your horrific experiences and I am all for vastly stronger regulations for anything marketed to children. But abandoning an entire ecosystem because it can be used for evil ends is just not a sustainable approach to life. We'd be left with nothing. Maybe Roblox is a unique and exceptional evil that requires a more severe solution? But more likely, it's just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not.

mmazing 4y ago
I've played many many hours of Roblox with my nephew, and I've yet to encounter anything close to what this article is talking about. I rarely talk in that game, so I'm essentially indistinguishable from a child to any predators. I've heard plenty of inappropriate language (almost exclusively simple cursing), but that's about it. I don't want to discount the content of this article, but I agree that it's more likely "just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not."
youerabigot 4y ago