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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

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.
- sothatsit 1y ago
  Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
  - Manuel_D 1y ago
    Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Rastonbury 1y ago
      In those games its more difficult to create a private hangout space or "GTA for kids". Haven't heard of the weird romance thing, but seen my nephew playing a roblox game where the goal is kill as many people wheelchairs as you can. I saw I guess the humor in it because I played San Andreas when I was his age but him mom might have been shocked. Those other games are much more restricted in the possibilities, moderation seems impossible
    - sothatsit 1y ago
      Roblox has a very young playerbase, even when compared to Minecraft and Fortnite. Roblox is also unique in the sheer quantity of offences that happen on their platform, and that is why they are often singled out. But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety. The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    IIuc, the original point/implication of this thread of conversation was more like "there's an unusally high concentration of child predation on Roblox", which, while not invalidating it, is a considerably different problem than "there is more child predation than there ought to be on Roblox". The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.
taneq 1y ago
> child romance themed game Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S
diggan 1y ago
> you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
- op00to 1y ago
  It’s important to be involved. It’s also important to give kids safe freedom with guardrails. It’s a balancing act.

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.

sothatsit 1y ago
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
- Manuel_D 1y ago
  Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rastonbury 1y ago
    In those games its more difficult to create a private hangout space or "GTA for kids". Haven't heard of the weird romance thing, but seen my nephew playing a roblox game where the goal is kill as many people wheelchairs as you can. I saw I guess the humor in it because I played San Andreas when I was his age but him mom might have been shocked. Those other games are much more restricted in the possibilities, moderation seems impossible
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    Roblox has a very young playerbase, even when compared to Minecraft and Fortnite. Roblox is also unique in the sheer quantity of offences that happen on their platform, and that is why they are often singled out. But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety. The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  IIuc, the original point/implication of this thread of conversation was more like "there's an unusally high concentration of child predation on Roblox", which, while not invalidating it, is a considerably different problem than "there is more child predation than there ought to be on Roblox". The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.

taneq 1y ago

> child romance themed game Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S

diggan 1y ago

> you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.

op00to 1y ago
It’s important to be involved. It’s also important to give kids safe freedom with guardrails. It’s a balancing act.