Problems at Roblox
thebearcave.substack.com
thebearcave.substack.com
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).
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-blackou...
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.
This is less about spying or snooping and more about knowing children aren't mature enough to have private conversations with strangers.
I think people forget how mature children actually are.
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.
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.
I think children develop vastly differently from each other, maybe some others wouldn't have been doing "RP" until they were 17?
What if you were early?
I remember when I was 14-15 I wanted to play games and "hide and seek", whilst some of my friends had started enjoying sitting down and just talking, how boring.
We still played hide-and-seek at that age, but we would rebrand/reframe it in terms of a wargame with a name like "manhunt." This was decades ago though.
I haven't seen kids playing outside in about as long.
And be completely open and upfront about the dangers, and how the "scams" work.
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.
Gotta type the message and send as quick as possible: those SCVs ain’t gonna start mining minerals or vespene gas on their own; supply depots won’t build themselves.
I've recently met a few old school Eve players, I never joined back in its golden days, but basically that's been my take away is that everyone on that game was a sketchy scammer, extracting data and information from other players off the game to take advantage of their location.
My experience from years of intermittently playing EVE is that because it's only one server and you can't get your character renamed or just transfer to another community people might be roleplaying assholes ingame but the toxicity level is actually lower than in other games.
In aggregate the judgement and maturity required to protect themselves from being exploited has not quite fully developed.
It's why there are so many social and legal protections for children, they are just inherently vulnerable.
Talking is good but not enough at all.
It becomes scarier once you factor in that kids' learning is not linear, and a 12-13 old kid is simultaneously dealing with hormonal changes as well and you have a situation that most parents can barely deal with!
Counterpoint: the very phenomenon you mention could be a consequence of overprotective parenting.
By the age of 12, it's time to start explaining some uncomfortable things to your kids. Especially if you're going to let them interact with strangers (of any age) online.
Think of the elaborate long-term deception that can be involved in regular heterosexual marriages. Some people have multiple families that don’t know about each other! Now consider what it can be like if that same dark energy is applied to lying to a child online.
I highly recommend the movie.
We are going to:
a.) Educate her on the general concept of pedophiles.
b.) Arm her with specific tactics about specific communities.
c.) Monitor.
d.) Get her permission to constantly log into her accounts and play as her.
I pray this is enough. :(
I simply don't understand that need.
I'm thinking about introducing our eight year old to basic computational literacy, but I'm planning to have that be without any internet access at all. He can learn to type, write, program, do digital painting / photo editing, movie editing, sound editing, and 3D animation without general internet access.
How is playing online multiplayer video games a need for a child?
Even if you think it is for some reason I'm not seeing, why not have het play games where you can run a private server, so you have control over exactly who can log in and can keep an eye on things like chat logs?
It is mitigated somewhat by our homeschooling, I think, as well as the families we tend to hang out with having similar cultural values.
We homeschool. Our friends are about as careful with devices and children as we are, so far as I can tell, and more often than not we're seeing them in non-internet contexts like playgrounds and parks.
He does use the Netflix Kids interface to start the next episode of shows during their daily allotment of screen time (which we keep a close eye on, so they're only watching shows we approve), but he has no concept of the web or that he could use that interface for anything other than TV time.
At first, we started with a strict 'hands off' policy because we didn't see how it was a need for her. But then the pandemic hit and due to a variety of factors, it ended up being our best option for her to socialize with other people her age.
Private servers are great, but we discovered an interesting vulnerability that created a need to both educate and protect her. I was surprised by how many 'age appropriate' (whatever that means) Youtube videos provide detailed steps on how to connect to private servers.
That introduced a need to trust her completely. We have to trust her to never sneak away and never get access to a device without supervision. If we misplace our trust, she could end up a victim. We hope she doesn't and in reality, she likely won't, but I can only say 'likely'.
So now we're backed into a corner. Technical guard rails are one option but she's been obsessed with figuring out how things work since she was very young. Again, if there's a small possibility of danger, that's too much for us. So we're left with the least bad option - educate, trust as appropriate and verify.
Or alternately, some nice person on HN could build a parent time machine so we could go back in time and make an entirely different decision. The more time goes by, the more I agree with you. But again, we really fucked that one up and now that the cat is out of the bag, there's a risk that major changes will make sneaking around even more appealing. And again, that's just too much danger.
TLDR - I am dumb, you are smart.
I will say that longer-term I absolutely do plan to give my kids unfettered internet access. The day will come they need to learn to cope with it, so might as well have them do it when I'm around to hopefully be of some help.
One slightly out-there idea for how to roll it back - ditch WiFi entirely. Internet access is by using a physical cable at one or two locations in the house.
Harder to subvert, and the kids see that you share the constraint, so it may be slightly more palatable.
You can't educate kids to identify pedo's. Online and in Roblox they are exectly the same as them. With siblings, parents that stop them from doing stuff, and so on. There is nothing remarkable about them to educate kids or yourself about.
This is not bad on itself, I think it's a fundamental step of becoming young adults. And it doesn't mean parents can never trust children. But neither can they assume that what was discussed can be always given for granted.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
You're right, of course. Some experiences are worse than others. And it's worth protecting kids from as much negativity as possible.
This is also how most people, regardless of age, learn.
The key is - did you have to warn your son again?
I subscribe to natural consequence parenting within guardrails. People learn from experience reliably, the key is to allow manageable consequences.
The point people are making here is that your child is not on an equal playing field with the predator. The predators have an overwhelming advantage.
The issue isn’t the account getting stolen. The issue is my son giving what should be privileged information to strangers on the internet. In this case, the impact was a stolen steam account but it could easily have been much worse.
That’s kinda the same for adults? I expect a lot from some adults, I expect basically nothing from others.
It’s not the fact they’re kids (e.g. under the arbitrary age of 18), it’s how responsible they are in general.
> I've personally witnessed my kids doing things they knew they shouldn't and were specifically warned against, yet were surprised when the outcome matched what they were told would happen.
I’ve done this many times (ignore what my parents told me), and been bitten a few times. But I’ve also been right that nothing bad happened an equal number of times. It makes sense to me they would keep trying, that’s what it means to be a kid.
That said, I’m a great fan of the saying “If it looks to good to be true then it probably is.”
It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
"One key part of that trajectory is the development of the prefrontal cortex, a significant part of the brain, in terms of social interactions, that affects how we regulate emotions, control impulsive behavior, assess risk and make long-term plans. Also important are the brain’s reward systems, which are especially excitable during adolescence. But these parts of the brain don’t stop growing at age 18. In fact, research shows that it can take more than 25 years for them to reach maturity."
So, yes, teach your children how to avoid predators. That is excellent. But this is the last line of defense. Since children have major impulse control and emotional regulation deficits and the predators have a major asymmetrical advantage in behavioral engineering, it is overwhelmingly the job of the parents to the extent possible to just keep the predators away.
> "Internet is scary"
Damn right it is. Children are uniquely impressionable and imprintable for a long time. Seeing or being forced to do gnarly stuff at the wrong time is permanently disfiguring.
> Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends.
Yes, the traditional way that would happen is at someone's house. Together. In person. Which provides some level of protection against predation and a fuller/richer/healthier social experience. Where the venue is virtual those protections are lost and more vigilance is required.
> If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.
There are wolves in the world. There always have been and always will be (as you say). It's a never ending and virtually thankless job (in fact, you will regularly be abused for doing it), but keeping the wolves at bay is parenting job #1. Get them to maturity whole, healthy, intact, and self-sufficient.
I'm not going to share experiences to the extent of the OP, but I have kids and I've met some wolves.
It's ridiculously cliche and infantilizing. The brain continues to change through your entire lifetime. Not to take away from the rest of your post, which I broadly agree with.
Keeping the wolves at bay is an impossible task. Reducing the exposure to the wolves, educating on recognizing the wolves, and mitigating the negative consequences of the wolves is a far more viable set of goals.
...which is "keeping the wolves at bay".
That's a myth, there was a hn article on it a few months back. Could just as easily have selected 12 iirc.
One concrete action in that vein is “we taught our child to avoid Roblox”.
One good strategy to avoid being preyed upon is to avoid places where the risk of predators is unacceptably high.
Pedophiles are extremely extremely clever and know exactly how to manipulate their targets. Just like spam, they don't go for every kid but they target the ones they know they can manipulate. If your child happens to be the target of a pedophile it's extremely, extremely difficult. We had some close calls on Roblox because my kid was an early reader/writer/typer so I was watching everything he was doing and cut away as soon as weird stuff started happening and then I deleted the app entirely. Now he's on Minecraft but I have a dedicated Minecraft server and only his friends play on it.
There are certain dangers that you can safely expose your children to with limited negative or even good consequences. Learning how to carefully climb structures at a young age is a great skill and if they fall down, they learn to be more careful. Learning your own limits at a young age is great. If they break their arm doing a skateboarding trick, that sucks, but they will learn more about conquering fear from bouncing back.
Getting conned into sending nude photos or being roped into the virtual hands of a pedophile are quite often things that kids have an extremely hard time recovering from. It's basically like sending your kid to play on the highway and expecting them to "learn" from the experience. "Well, they can learn how to be careful around moving cars!" is a ridiculous statement when the entire environment is dangerous and the outcomes are extremely binary.
It's easier to teach them how to avoid predators when they're much older, but Roblox is targeted for much younger kids.
It also goes without saying that they need constant guidance, reminders, and monitoring.
Either way, I have a 10 year old who's played for a few years now. Like many here, I really tried to avoid it, and for us, it was the pandemic. This is just where the friends were.
Anyway, I think we're doing okay with it. Back then, she was only allowed to play on a big screen-ish computer in a place where anyone in the family could she was doing -- and even "allowed" here feels weird, because this was never a discussion or a fight, that's just how things are for my kids, for now.
So I've peeped in on the chat a bunch, she just knows that sometimes I will be over her shoulder, and frankly I get a big kick out of putting on a ridiculous narrating voice for her little dragon role-plays.
She now has her own computer that she can play in her room by herself if she likes -- but, and maybe this is just our parenting thing, we can always go into her room. If the door is closed, we do knock -- but I've literally never been "rejected" here. In fact the only time I can recall her requesting privacy, it was a phone call with a boy (who we know, whos parents we know, etc).
So yeah, not that stranger danger doesn't exist, from here it really feels like this isn't much a function of "roblox" or even "the internet/computers?"
We play real games now, or occasionally Minecraft mods. The frozen Minecraft adventure mod is quite fun
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.
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.
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.
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.
...or maybe that's the reason I'm hanging out on HN with the rest of you as an adult.
Well, times have changed and the creeps have gotten creepier and more organized. They have more channels, more ways to hide, more ways to collaborate, and more ways to do serious damage.
As for the 80s and 90s? I also survived doing some stupid and shady things on BBSes and the internet. I don’t want children to have learn the lessons I learned the same way. I also know people who didn’t come out okay. Who didn’t have a parent or friend check in on them, and got in deep in bad stuff and ended up in prison or dead. Don’t try to cook up drugs in your kitchen using a random recipe on the internet, kids.
Because predators are older and smarter than your average naïve kid. A few years ago I'm making breakfast for my wife (I work from home) and the doorbell rings - it's two town cops asking if I'm the parent of <my kid's name>. Turns out, some local pedophile had sent some dick pics to my 12 year old kid several months prior on Snapchat and they wanted to interview her. This was the first we'd heard of what had happened. We'd long since removed her from social media (unrelated to this event). And this was after spending countless hours repeating ourselves to death about not talking to strangers online. And yes we checked her phone daily...But Snapchat being what it is (disappearing messages), makes it more difficult to audit. She even told this guy what neighborhood we lived in. Since this was his first offense, the guy got 6 months probation and a permanent restraining order against him. Nothing ever came of it, and she's a few years older (and hopefully wiser) ... and the social media restrictions are still on.
In hindsight I wouldn't give my kid a phone until they were > 15 years old and even then it would depend on their maturity level.
It’s either allowing dangers of internet or allowing some peer pressure because your kid is “loser who not only is not on snapgram but doesn’t even have a phone and they’re in a second grade already”
These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we used to know it. Kids used to draw something that their parents would hang on the fridge and they didn't make 350 bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to create and they had to work.. and they stopped being kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these communities to profit off child labor.
But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat - then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter, instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
THat desire for instant gratification and community at all costs then has them looking for other people in similar situations and that usually means self diagnosing things, searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep up. Not even them.
So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't equipped to handle it either.
Parents are absolutely not equipped for this.
The tricky thing is that for this to be effective, you need block all general-purpose browsers as well, which kinda sucks.
Even as an adult how many of us get scammed. Even cops do!
We need antivirus software and firewalls for our brains. It’s coming.
Obviously more subtle sarcasm is harder to pick up on, but even adults struggle with this, eg. Americans having a hard time with British "bone-dry wit".
Roblox (and basically all social networks/games for that matter) are pretty much the wild west when it comes to moderation and protection of minors.
The way I hope to prevent that is to ensure that my daughter knows that, while I may disapprove of things like drinking, I'll always forgive her. I also make her clear on the line adults should not cross.
Besides that, I try to build her self esteem and street smarts as much as I can. In addition I have her question authority, myself included.
You can certainly do that, but it wouldn’t be good enough. It’s like spear phishing, it doesn’t matter that 90% of people recognize the attempt and report it, the 10% that doesn’t is absolutely unacceptable (at least when you transplant it to Roblox).
Would you accept a 10% chance your kid is going to be groomed?
I teach my kid to not run into the street. He does it anyway if he gets distracted. He isn't 'trying' to get hit a by a car.
When he's older he'll be able to control himself. For now I don't let him near the street on his own.
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.
If your local park is full of bums and needles and the predator registry map around it looks like it has chicken pox, absolutely going to a different park is the reasonable strategy.
Roblox is predatory platform in so many ways.
I'm missing a step, here....and I suspect a few others are as well.
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.
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."
My thought is that this significantly reduces the richness of the in-game interactions (implies less engagement, implies less revenue), but doesn't need moderators to keep the game from being used for illegal sexual encounters, which is nice if your game targets kids.
Back when I played (early days), the common thing was indeed to mute opponents right when the game starts.
I totally agree that it removes the richness. You lose out on any meaningful, even if small or quaint, connections, and might as well be interacting with an AI that triggers a "Well played!" at the end of the game.
There's no right answer here, it's an intractable problem since the beginning of the internet.
It reminds me of the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog a bit. The problem is human nature projected into the internet.
> A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "It is in my nature."[1]
I don't personally view this as a negative.
It's the team-based games where kids are constantly yelling or berating their teammates for missteps that are far more annoying and negative.
An 8 year old girl should have other opportunities for ‘meaningful connections’, so I don’t see this as a huge loss.
But as an adult, it seems like a rare (and perhaps valuable?) counterpoint to "don't judge other people" or "don't judge a book by its cover." Sometimes... those behaviors are adaptive.
I think the moral is supposed to be: "Some people are just irredeemably awful to the point that they'll self destruct and take you down with them if you try to help them" which... I guess is true but pretty jaded for a children's story, haha. Although, old fashioned fables do tend to have that dark aspect.
Though, compare that to Facebook which knowingly allowed white supremacists to organize deadly attacks against BLM protesters, let ISIS recruit on their platform, and facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Hearthstone is doing pretty well compared to that.
Hello stranger on the internet .. don't you think, you used a bit more than "Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten" here?
I still understood you, though. Which is my point, I had awesome communications with many strangers on the internet. Whether in games or forums.
But yes, the average online communication is quite low and toxic. And I had to learn to walk away or ignore most of it. So for small kids it is maybe a good thing, if their games do not have chat enabled. Which means pretadors then can only contact them through whatsapp, instagram, facebook, tiktok,...
Pandoras Box is wide open already and blocking it all, means isolating your kid.
The annoying thing about Roblox is that they're really not trying to experiment and figure out what could work, instead hanging on to a chat model that kids definitely can hack around.
The game was online-multiplayer, where two players would work their way through a series of puzzle-like rooms together. But they would match you with a random person and you would have no idea who they were, not even a screen name.
Then, the only way you could communicate was by making a little chirping noise. Tap the button and you make a little chirp. Hold it down and release for a big chirp. If you weren't looking at the other player you would see a faint glow in their direction when they chirped, so they could grab your attention. And that was it.
There were times when I would miss something and start to continue forward, so the other player would chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp to say "Wait, look over here!" I had no idea if they were pissed at me or being friendly about it, but given how cute the whole thing was I would assume the latter. It just felt nice, like I was meeting a new friend every time.
I've gone back to that game several times over the years, but sadly nobody seems to be playing it anymore. My first time playing feels like a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can never be replicated. Really great game.
I still have fond memories of traipsing around the ruins in that game with complete strangers. The restricted communication made it more memorable for some reason. Plus, just a great game overall.
It’s enough to have a full discussion in the emergency meetings without any possibility that I can see for abusive communication. The only weak link is the player aliases themselves.
Especially during covid lockdowns when people were meeting much less in person than normal, social connection through games was important.
There's also an entire category of games games (2nd life) and non games (omegle) which are built on communication with strangers. For some people that's part of why they play these games.
Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing their business model. Their business model is essentially structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children over mobile platforms.
On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even worse.
It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the same way.
In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for.
Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.
It's also an absolutely wild assertion to say that a platform with in-game currency is encouraging pedophiles by design. I think Roblox is seriously screwing up here, but the way you're phrasing it, that's an inevitability rather than a series of mistakes and bad judgment.
Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.
The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need, effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve, content that's actually somehow worth playing for that time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel meaty but actually give the player very little.
That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of experienced professionals and very well understood principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in. Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are very different from anything else in the game industry, designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to playtime to conversion rate.
More recently there are some games that are beginning to lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn guy for outreach" thing.
It is worrying to think that kids might end up dropping thousands of dollars on a game, but I think if that does start happening, you're going to see it in the news instantly. Like I said, it is really idiotic of Roblox to even begin venturing down that path; they should be clamping down on that kind of monetization to stop it from growing, but so far they have not done anything except enforce basic loot box legal standards (must show odds).
That doesn’t seem any different from a normal allowance that they buy Robux with? And removes the intermediate step of me needing to enter my credit card details in exchange for my kids cash.
Whether you allow them to buy Robux in the first place is a different question.
Edit: you can downvote me all you want but all you have to do is look at MTG’s Twitter profile to see what I’m talking about. For instance: https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-sec-230-2657233040
How about this: "free speech" applies, equally, to posting furry porn and objecting to it.
you’re posting nonsense btw
There’s nothing wrong with a hit piece if it’s factual
Nothing wrong with porn, but it's relevant to this article.
I have nothing wrong with people selling porn, but it's not remotely kid appropriate. Society expects a large berth between the two. If a kids company hired a porn-star to sell their products that would be weird, even if they didn't mention porn while on the clock. Similarly it would be weird if Roblox was also a joint venture with PornHub. This wouldn't hold if they were just Orthodox Jews.
I have nothing against producing, sharing, and consuming pornography but its typically done in private. A social media persona is public. It is inappropriate to share pornography in public. When that public persona is attached to a place of responsibility, then doing so is showing poor judgement. It's not at all comparable to being an orthodox jew.
Lots of people consume porn, very few see fit to share it on social media.
Just make a spare account and have some shame about it. When it's part of your public persona is when it's a problem.
Unless it's literally of you, then things get a lot more complicated.
In my experience the people who consistently fail to draw these lines also tend to end up being some sort of toxic to you and or your friend group and or your company.
Invite a friend who stinks because they don't shower? You're going to lose friends over it who don't want to be around it. Invite a friend who publicly displays porn? Same deal.
And again, unless the person in question shared smut with children, how would this be relevant to pedophilia? I am also not arguing that this is the wisest move on the part of the exec in question, it looks stupid, but there should be nothing indictable about this.
Ultimately, this is an article about exposing how a corporation through negligence at best and malicious intent is empowering child abusers to abuse children, why go the Jess extra effort and try and make these people look worse by pointing out that these people like porn?
it isn't indictable, but people are free to have a much higher bar than the legal system sets for what they consider acceptable standards to interact with their children.
you're free to post all the porn you like on your public social media profiles. parents are free to not really want you to be around their children.
the fact that you are legally free to do all kinds of things in this country doesn't mean that you can do them without any social repercussions.
the freedom of speech isn't freedom from criticism, and from other people's negative social reactions, it just says that the government won't throw you in jail for it.
The scope and worth of that principle can and should be debated, but it shouldn't be ignored. E.g. shunning anyone who expressed the opinion that maybe homosexuality shouldn't be banned would have been bad for social change.
I think sex work should just be legalized. Roblox's head of content moderation should not be a sex worker though.
I don't have a problem with people having lots of visible body art. I also don't have a problem with employers not wanting to hire people who do. I don't think anyone is the victim there since its just the consequences of personal choices and should be seen as a situation which is working out for both sides of the equation (those people probably would never be happy at those jobs).
Based on your job you may be held to different standards than society at large and there is nothing wrong with that.
Jfc = jesus fucking christ (exasperated)
horny on main = being horny on ur main account. like the boomers who make thirsty comment on 20yo models ig posts without realizing it's their real names they're using.
freeze peach = messed up spelling of free speech used to mock ppl who whine MuH fREE sPeECH when they can't say the nword on twitter (literally 1984).
Urbandictionary is good for all these btw.
In this case, I find it very strange that the head of Roblox's Trust & Safety department didn't think twice about following indecent accounts on public social media account. Even stranger still, that a company who pretends to value the safety of children either didn't bother with a basic background check, or saw it and went "yeah, this guy's got good judgement."
I've got nothing against people publicly endorsing/following these things, but I'd expect this dude to have enough discretion to recognize that many parents would object, and keep it on a private account like a normal person.
Heads of PR for major companies have been fired for a heck of a lot less.
However I think the main issue is that said person was using a "professional" twitter handle to engage in this sort of stuff. Sadly I suspect that the furry porn bit was added to make them seem more deviant. When it should be more a case of inappropriate.
The fact that somebody likes gay furry porn and posts nude pictures of themselves in adult spaces has nothing to do with child sex abuse.
On the other hand, it isn't all that surprising; crusaders against porn and deviance frequently tie in far larger and more serious issues, but this author has done the opposite: take very serious issues of CSA and in order to inflame the reader's sensibilities feels he must mention that 'deviant' content.
I'd say it's not exactly ideal for a company aimed at kids to have their public figures, supposed people of trust, sharing porn of themselves openly.
I don't have an issue with porn but I can see how this is an issue for the company and its reputation.
You can take issue with it if you want, but the fact is that there is real world overlap.
Does this author have some particular axe to grind with furries or something?
It is clear that Roblox have failed to deliver the moderation capabilities necessary to market their platform as "safe," and are more interested in making money.
But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything?
And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all.
This essay, and this substack in general, really lack focus - they publish dramatic exposés which are just a hodgepodge of random "dirt" thrown together, some interesting and serious and mostly nothing.
Half-baked? It's enough if casino sites exist for a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws.
I agree that it's unethical and Roblox failing to crack down on these sites by any means they can, again, represents a failing.
But I'd have liked to see a separate post with a deeper investigation into how the gambling sites are structured, and how the cash-out economy works.
Proxy-gambling using skins and secondary markets has been highly controversial since at least the CS:GO days and unfortunately it _isn't_ that clear that there's a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws on the part of Roblox. Valve have been somewhat successful so far in defending themselves against the Washington gaming commission and many lawsuits surrounding CS:GO skin gambling.
But, Roblox have a direct cash-out program for in-game content developers which may change their situation.
I'd again, have loved to seen this investigated more in another blog post. This one was weirdly unfocused to me because it started with serious, well-founded allegations of inadequate moderation leading to harm to children, in contrast to "safe" marketing. Then it progressed to a random aside accusing a safety officer of being a furry (???). And then flipped to another aside about finding a gambling site.
It's one thing to watch/engage with this stuff privately in your personal life. It's quite another thing to have:
>> Roblox’s former social media manager ran a public pornographic blog with “furry porn” and photos of himself
And
>> Roblox’s official verified Twitter account retweeted content from “DukeButDuke” with #FanArtFriday.
This is not
> jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows
This is Roblox's public representatives at a high level in the company publicly promoting this stuff. Put another way, if you posted a blog article about furry porn and pictures of yourself nude, then prominently displayed it next to your public work profile, do you honestly think that your company would have no right to fire you? There's a reason lots of bloggers that work for big companies will put "this blog and these ideas have no affiliation with company X" disclaimers everywhere, and that's just for semi controversial blogging topics.
No moderation system is flawless. If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content.
I do find the digging in to the personal lives of the employees here pretty bad taste. Yes an adult can look at porn and have sexual relationships with other adults, whether they work at Roblox or Toys R Us.
Problem with this is kids are sneaky, curious and liars.
Do you have actual parental experience that counters any of this because it seems you have strong opinions on how to parent?
Also it sounds like you’re taking it personal as if I’m name calling the kids. That means you’re definitely lacking parental experience because it’s a simple fact that every kid is sneaky and lies albeit to various degrees.
This applies to most things.
Hard rule: never send photos of yourself to someone online, without letting one of us do it for you.
Guide: Don't trust any adults or other kids who ask you about your underwear
Rule: Don't tell anyone where you live or give them your address or where you go to school
Guide: If you feel uncomfortable talking to someone, stop talking to them and get one of your parents.
For children below a certain maturity threshold, taking strong action to prevent unsupervised internet access seems totally reasonable to me.
True, but it’s generally considered to be in good taste to not advertise it to the world.
My kindergarden teacher can do anything they want in their time off, but I do not want to know of it.
I wonder if there is an opportunity here to get a fully distributed effort going, based on web of trust.
Most users don't do web of trust verification even in apps which support it, like signal, because it's not worth the effort for general low stakes communication. But people are willing to put in a lot of effort to keep their kids safe. And the requirement here: "I want my kids only to message adults I trust, or kids that an adult I trust has verified are kids" is a good match for web of trust, because it's basically an emulation of how the mark 1 meatspace method of doing it worked. (yes, my use case here is for younger kids, older ones should be able to explore more and I haven't figured out how that would work).
As a parent dealing with some of this currently, this isn't entirely how I'd put it.
Roblox is marketed for kids, and claims to have a large number of parental controls, but in fact they either don't work or don't exist. Most parents aren't savvy enough to know they even need to check for that.
Meanwhile, I'm extremely computer literate (a developer even), and have largely banned my kids from the internet, installed multiple blockers and monitors, and my kid still gets to shady places and content. It's f-ing impossible unless you are going to literally watch over their shoulder the whole time, which is wildly unrealistic and frankly immoral once they reach a certain age.
It's exasperating.
The same applies for things that are "cool" or whatever the current term is. Either you become part of the "in group" and earn some of your child's respect or whatever you touch no longer becomes corrupted by your "boomer energy". Both are a win and far more effective than the cat and mouse game of training them to be mini pen-testers.
Beyond that there is no trust.
1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW content, and 2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase)
This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt with the NSFW content in one swoop.
An employee ran a pornographic blog? Their twitter retweeted something a pedophile made? The head of content moderation is a furry?
So what?!
This guilt by association nonsense is the law of contagion! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion
Especially when finding the furry porn required an investigation into catching said person's non-work Twitter that was named pseudonymously.
You guys over-index on this nonsense because outrage is a drug injected directly into your brain. There's enough wrong about this platform that could be improved, but you're all more interested in just raging online and so you must invent this whole Axis-of-Evil. This, coming from someone whose sexual interests are pretty damned vanilla.
The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate.
All of this is literally intuition, but we're being trained over time to ignore it in the name of sex-positivity and other nonsense. It's just grooming redefined.
Retweeting art does not imply any knowledge of the "pedophilia". Also, "pedophile" is a term so general it's sometimes applied to things like finding people aged 17 attractive (which is the majority of heterosexual men). As far as I know the artist in question might just have liked some hentai that had a japanese schoolgirl in at some point. At that point the levels of indirection in your Law of Contagion are absurd even by the standards of believers in majiks!
> The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate.
This would be just as accurate if the moderation head had an interest in gay sex.
> All of this is literally intuition
And your intuitions aren't anywhere near as strong as the intuitions of the 70s parents who made sure gay men weren't anywhere near their children. Should we have followed those intuitions too?
This company has a lot of bad karma to settle, and their profit model is unsustainable.
Pedophiles did, and do, exist, but this is a fact of life in any manner of social media or large community; discussing frankly how malevolent some may be is imperative, even if it does not preempt all danger posed. The alternative, stifling all manners of creative expression available to those who may otherwise be socially shunted, is untenable to me, as it does not line up with what my experience growing up using this technology taught me.
Nothing in life is without risk--exposure to this risk over a platform that's online, somewhat discoverable, and insulated is vastly preferable to keeping your kids blissful and unknowing of what would threaten them. Please do not attempt to parent in such a way that motivates your children to hide things from you and cut you out of the loop entirely.
Now, that doesn't stop kids from lying about their age when registering, but that's another can of worms.
There are numerous laws that detail the responsibilities of operating anything on the Internet that is targeted towards children, and Roblox seems to be completely ignoring these. Not to mention they are ignoring their moral responsibility of protecting their underage users.
Roblox needs to shut down Robux redeeming immediately and prevent any kind of interaction where one account has not been verified to be of age and accounts that have been verified, and maybe allow interactions between close age groups. It's not that hard to do so.
For example Scouts relies (desperately) on volunteers. So unfortunately the “trusted adult” is perhaps sometime TOO interested in volunteering. And the Scout group sadly doesn’t think deeply enough cause they’re just happy to have a parent volunteer. You can see how this can create a dynamic that attracts the wrong kind of person that want to groom families to prey on children.
Bad actors are just more dedicated than the good ones. It's a hard situation to fix barring the complete elimination of privileged positions.
It's a lot easier for a child to be unsupervised on the internet. I know I could do a lot of what I wanted online growing up even thought my in person interactions were pretty limited.
Part of that was my parents unawareness about the internet but even if they were smarter about it I would have found ways to get around anything they put in place.
If they don't do this already they need to divide the player bases. Want to play in the <13 rooms? You have to use the same word whitelist they have.
Maybe they should be faster but I wonder if ultimately the solution that some folks would want is just no communication for kids apps ... I've got mixed feelings about that.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers -- https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. -- https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
They absolutely require closer parental supervision, though. Moreover, the developers at this company need to crack down on pedos both from without and (according to the article) within.
Unless you're also terrified of cardiologists? [1]
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
Roblox teaches kids about being exploited by scrip.
Is this all potential upside from their token and service fees, or what?
It's based on a creepy/horror game called Baldi's Basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo Obviously very NSFW
In context, the song is just adult humor. But, yeah, definitely does not belong in a children's game.
there's a lot about this article that needlessly misses the mark, it's annoying.
We originally locked the account down to try and keep her safe.
With commuication off and the account limited to only th Roblox verified games we thought we were okay.
It turns out that even in those games there’s usually an ability to change a “nickname” which allows users to chat by just updating their nickname.
As a dev I know how straight forward it would be to stop this frok happening.
Upon discovering the problem I contacted Roblox support and we pulled the kid out of Roblox.
Fyi; roblox support is not good, when the problem relates to child safety they pull all the classic tricks to make it seem like a “you” problem. They blame the third party “experience” developer, despite the game being vouched for by roblox. They close tickets after a short period with no response. They also treat this widespread issue (using nicknames to chat) as an individual breach of ts & cs, rather than fixing thr problem. Blaming the end user, who’s usually younger than 12.
Given the age of my and other kids I’d assume they’re violating GDPR & other global data protection laws on a regular basis.
Also, as a company Roblox is evidentially a bad actor. I would rather trust Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony parental controls. Not that they are perfect, and don't make mistakes, but their business models don't run on whatever Roblox Inc does.
There is also practically no good reason for adults to own such things, as they are designed to fritter away your attention on the cheapest content possible (generally old, re-hashed "community generated" content).
In my opinion.
1. Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ )
2. Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY )