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I recently attended a class with my kid on internet safety taught by an attorney specializing in defending children accused of crimes, especially those involvin

by op00to 1y ago

I recently attended a class with my kid on internet safety taught by an attorney specializing in defending children accused of crimes, especially those involving computers. Roblox is like the #1 cesspool for bad shit going down with kids on the internet. Social media is bad as well, and my kids do neither. No, Roblox is not the end of the world, but there’s no real compelling reason to open up to it. They play with their friends on XBox Live, with voice chat limited to friends we personally add.

UnlockedSecrets 1y ago
As someone with no experience of roblox but has heard this a few times, what exactly about it makes it 'such' a bad thing??
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  [flagged]
- charcircuit 1y ago
  13 years old and above can talk and dm with any other account also 13 years old and above. Unless a parent account disables it.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    I once overheard our nine year old explaining to a friend how to lie about their birthdate to create a YouTube account. Age checks are not meaningfully a working thing.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      Parent account can be used for any age and can disable chat.
- superb_dev 1y ago
  The YouTube channel “People Make Games” had a really great video on the exploitation going on
  - bentcorner 1y ago
    IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)
- cokeandpepsi 1y ago
  [dead]
- Rotdhizon 1y ago
  Roblox has a seemingly impossible to solve problem with child predators. Kids have the oddest talent of being able to stumble into the most unknown, niche games where these people lurk. Roblox now has voice chat as well and you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention. Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays. As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
  - Manuel_D 1y ago
    If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today. I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
    - 1y ago
- jovial_cavalier 1y ago
  Because the company knows that there are child predators on their site, and not only do they not care, but that is basically their tacit business model. https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/ https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/ edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees - “You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.” “You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
- op00to 1y ago
  I think it’s easy for people to contact each other in game and this to get kids to move over to a discord away from moderation. That’s the basic MO the instructor said how “grooming” in Roblox works.
lokar 1y ago
AIUI, they let stranger adults give kids in game currency. What do you think that leads to?
- Manuel_D 1y ago
  The same was true in World of Warcraft. What did that lead to?
landl0rd 1y ago
This is because roblox is the #1 place for kids to interact and play and such. The creeps and weirdos and predators are going to follow wherever they go.
jjani 1y ago
I'm sure it's the #1 platform involved in "defending children accused of crimes involving online platforms" in whatever US state that attorney operates in. But even that sounds better than the lifelong dopamine system disabilities that the likes of TikTok causes. Every other adult I talk to about social media admits having had to very deliberately uninstall/disable TikTok, else they just couldn't detach themselves from the screen. Now imagine what it does to kids. And how big of a % of users ends up like this compared to the % of all Roblox users traumatized by it. Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.
- op00to 1y ago
  They can both be horrible! My kids do none of any of that. Works well for us!
Manuel_D 1y ago
The #1 by raw numbers, or normalized for userbase?
- margalabargala 1y ago
  Raw numbers, of course. There are places on the internet dedicated to crime, so if you normalize by userbase all the 100% criminal sites come out on top. Only some of Roblox is trying to get children addicted to gambling.

by op00to 1y ago

UnlockedSecrets 1y ago

As someone with no experience of roblox but has heard this a few times, what exactly about it makes it 'such' a bad thing??

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
[flagged]
charcircuit 1y ago
13 years old and above can talk and dm with any other account also 13 years old and above. Unless a parent account disables it.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I once overheard our nine year old explaining to a friend how to lie about their birthdate to create a YouTube account. Age checks are not meaningfully a working thing.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    Parent account can be used for any age and can disable chat.
superb_dev 1y ago
The YouTube channel “People Make Games” had a really great video on the exploitation going on
- bentcorner 1y ago
  IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)
cokeandpepsi 1y ago
[dead]
Rotdhizon 1y ago
Roblox has a seemingly impossible to solve problem with child predators. Kids have the oddest talent of being able to stumble into the most unknown, niche games where these people lurk. Roblox now has voice chat as well and you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention. Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays. As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
- Manuel_D 1y ago
  If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today. I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
  - 1y ago
jovial_cavalier 1y ago
Because the company knows that there are child predators on their site, and not only do they not care, but that is basically their tacit business model. https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/ https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/ edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees - “You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.” “You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
op00to 1y ago
I think it’s easy for people to contact each other in game and this to get kids to move over to a discord away from moderation. That’s the basic MO the instructor said how “grooming” in Roblox works.

lokar 1y ago

AIUI, they let stranger adults give kids in game currency. What do you think that leads to?

Manuel_D 1y ago
The same was true in World of Warcraft. What did that lead to?

landl0rd 1y ago

This is because roblox is the #1 place for kids to interact and play and such. The creeps and weirdos and predators are going to follow wherever they go.

jjani 1y ago

I'm sure it's the #1 platform involved in "defending children accused of crimes involving online platforms" in whatever US state that attorney operates in. But even that sounds better than the lifelong dopamine system disabilities that the likes of TikTok causes. Every other adult I talk to about social media admits having had to very deliberately uninstall/disable TikTok, else they just couldn't detach themselves from the screen. Now imagine what it does to kids. And how big of a % of users ends up like this compared to the % of all Roblox users traumatized by it. Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.

op00to 1y ago
They can both be horrible! My kids do none of any of that. Works well for us!

Manuel_D 1y ago

The #1 by raw numbers, or normalized for userbase?

margalabargala 1y ago
Raw numbers, of course. There are places on the internet dedicated to crime, so if you normalize by userbase all the 100% criminal sites come out on top. Only some of Roblox is trying to get children addicted to gambling.