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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better.

I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game.

The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they “clearly weren’t being objective” and essentially gaslighting the people making the video.

I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don’t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It’s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - “oh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!”. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn’t make you clever. It makes you the villain.

(Video in question: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY )

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What's weird is no one really notices/cares about this type of behavior. I sometimes wonder if this is seen as a feature: institutional sociopathy shields powerful sociopathic people from their consequences.

A few possibilities:

* people generally cannot discern moral realities within complex systems, instead preferring simpler narratives ("he made a lot of money, he must be a decent chap")

* people can see it on occasion, but insist that the problem is the single bad actor rather than the system enabling them

* people realize they can't do much about it, as they're implicitly bound up in this system run amok

Yeah I’m puzzled why people don’t seem to care too. I think it’s mostly the third - complaining about companies acting malevolently is boring like climate change. Most people would rather not think about it.

At the companies themselves, I blame the C suite entirely. It’s a leadership problem. What is the vision for your company? Why do we all get out of bed in the morning? If the goal is to make the world better, then concerns about how your business is impacting the world would matter. But having a goal to simply to enrich the founders (which seems to be the case with most tech companies), is like making an entire car just so you can drive to the gas station.

Companies like Twitter and Roblox change the world by their very presence. It’s shameful to waste that capacity by not making the world better in the process.

Well, for public-traded companies, anyone in the C suite caught doing that would be fired, so it's not a mystery that they don't...

That’s simply not true. CEOs can and do argue for value based decision making in plenty of companies. Plenty of boards support them in this. Values alignment, “knowing your why”, acting with integrity - these are the qualities that help your company still be around in 100 years time.

Even if you want to make the most money possible, you usually won’t get there by screwing over your employees and customers.

I don't think a broader society pays their bills; their customers do.

"Broader society" is not a real entity; it's just a term to denote, presumably, the entire planet's population, given Roblox is not limited to a single country.

Pretty sure that's a metaphor ? There are pre-requisite conditions for Roblox to exist, and their actions are endangering those.

People make fun of the "we live in a society" "insight" - sadly it would seem that capitalism has gone so far, that even this is being forgotten now.

I don't know who "people" are here - I'm certainly not making fun of that.

Why I'm critiquing is for the same reason I mention your "people" silliness: massive overgeneralisations are sloppy and lead to wrong conclusions.

I saw part of that video the other day and what you and the guy in the video are saying is absurd. This guy is all butthurt that Roblox can't monitor and ban people for what goes on in Discord chats. How and why would anyone expect Roblox to enforce it or even care what happens off of their platform?

They shut the official forums down to not have to deal with moderation, they created the issue of third party communities

That's fine. They don't need to offer that service.

I’d have no problem if that was their stance. “Hey, we know about the abuse happening in the broader game development communities and we want to help, but we can’t control what happens on discord”. But that’s not their stance. They seem to be pretending nothing bad ever happens, and also (for some reason) running a stock market for children over Roblox items with extortionate profit taking on their end.

I don’t expect them to fix everything overnight. But there’s plenty they could do, if they weren’t too busy gaslighting and ignoring any criticism of their platform.

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