Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper
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Roblox creates an in-game stock market (with robinhood-esque charts!) for cosmetic doodads which they release for up to $10,000 USD "MSRP". Except that MSRP is in-game money so it doesn't seem real. Every time in-game money changes hands, they take 30%...so even if the cosmetic doodad appreciated 15% on the fun-looking chart, the child still loses money on their "investment" after fees. If you cash out your in-game money, their exchange rate again takes 30% vs buying-in.
By the time children are successfully creating games on Roblox, assuming they didn't get sucked into the ubiquitous child-labor scam "companies" that hire these children...they've been lusting over those $5,000 cosmetic items for so long that they spend the money they made on the platform, on the platform.
It's a roach motel for child labor. You can put your labor in, but you can never cash out. The shame spiral is real.
To summarize, they're worried that Roblox is not doing enough to police content off their platform. They're concerned that Roblox isn't doing anything about young game developers being exploited in private Discords or groups off of the platform, and the harassment that these kids receive off the platform.
They're then attacking Roblox about deleting their user forums because they had problems moderating it. They also fail to mention, that in an effort to moderate the games, young players have a lot of chat filters (or can have chat disabled completely) where words to other social media sites are completely banned. They mention that moderation is either ineffective or heavy-handed (which, to be fair, has always been a problem on every fucking platform). For Roblox its markedly worse, because they're one of the few places where young children are encouraged to socialize and play together. So moderation is very heavy handed and often illogical because there's always a layer of child exploitation and harassment accompanied by every decision.
They mention how young game developers practically have no chance at making games because all the popular ones have literal development teams behind them, and these teams congregate off-platform, and can copy ideas easily.
They worry about how there's a "black market" for collectible goods off-site, which Roblox isn't able to take down fast enough.
I can identify that there's actual problems with the platform, but most of this video is just a moral panic about how Roblox is a publicly traded company and Evil.
When most of the supporting evidence is obfuscated for the safety of people talking since they're all minors, its hard to verify if what they're claiming is actually true. That 11 year old kid that briefly talked about how his game never got a chance to be popular is about the only legitimate part of the video that isn't attached to some narrative that Roblox needs to engage in overbearing policing.
It was sad to see how Roblox's rewards and incentive structure with Robux completely edged out the vast majority of its active userbase out of the game development market on the platform. But the video doesn't focus on this. Instead it tries to make you worried that children are spending money offsite trying to buy skins, and that Roblox should try to police the entire Internet.
From my experience, moderating and policing, within this context, doesn't really work out. We just end up with subpar, stupid 'solutions' like not even having ALL-chat in a video game, because lo and behold, we could trash-talk our opponents (looking at Halo Infinite MP here).
Of course, at some point people will organize themselves on different platforms. We did the same back then, more than a decade ago on IRC and self-hosted Teamspeak servers. I don't see why Roblox would be 'responsible' for what's going on beyond their platform.
For the cosmetics store, I think this is something that is so omnipresent nowadays that Roblox would be stupid, not including it. Looking at all those shitty mobile games, why give them a pass and go hard on Roblox? Being able to obtain cosmetics and trading them seems to me like a core feature. Even if Roblox didn't give you the option to buy cosmetics using their virtual currency, some other platform (like the black markets) would be there to allow people to exchange items for real money. Roblox providing this service directly allows them to take a cut.
Is it morally bad the way it is now? Should Roblox not include such a cosmetic store in the first place? Probably, but what'd the alternatives look like and what would that entail?
Apart from calling Roblox out on morally bad business practices (which is ok), the discussion in the video feels a lot like 'demanding' a super safe and welcoming platform such that parents don't have to educate their children.
I believe the video is produced to be from a parent-perspective. I'm not a parent. So I simply interpret the video to be like, "LOOK AT THIS VIDEO, THE USERS ARE TALKING ABOUT THEIR EXPECTATIONS."
Now I think we, as technologists, could work now HARD to fix social media / content moderation. Invent something new, post about it next week here on HN, and either you profit or the whole world will benefit .. your choice. That is the way. GLHF
I think it is good to present concerns about morals being violated by technology and a tech-company's policies & practices.
What more / different would you want to see from a discovery video, covering a situation of moral failing of an influential technology + business?