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Comment by prakhar897 | Hacker News Reader

Well polished, but this is literally "Habbo Hotel".

There were a number of issues which lead to Habbo's downfall:

1. Anarcho Capitalism: Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field. This video explains this in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6jxjKPNZQ

2. Politically Incorrect Stuff: Lots of non conforming stuff happened. some of which actually made it to mainstream news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp2EZbbuMa0

3. Scams: Kids are the easiest demography to scam. It also teaches them at an early age how to scam people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDPTiFHfcs

Although right now this product is a bit different than Habbo, but how do the founders plan to address these? Especially the political one since anyone can make anything right now.

Edit: Sorry I edited the comment after realizing its Habbo.

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Except for the superficial similarity of an orthographic 3D view, this seems nothing like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo hotel was multiplayer and had in-game chat. Rooms.xyz does not appear to be multiplayer in that way.

Habbo hotel had an in-game currency that you used to buy objects / furniture. Rooms.xyz has no in game currency (that I can tell).

Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

Rooms and Habbo are nothing alike except for the similarity of art style. Habbo hotel is basically a glorified chat room, whereas Rooms seems like a Unity game engine for kids.

Of course, content moderation is a challenging issue for any tool that allows the creation and sharing of content, I agree with you there. But that’s not a challenge unique to Habbo Hotel!

IIRC they have VC funding so it's very likely in-game currency will show up.

Habbo hotel had "programmable logic" that facilitated the scams, gambling, and capitalism.

Habbo was not a "glorified chatroom", it was an MMO centered around an in-game currency and acquiring more of it.

> Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

The the first link in GP, there apparently was programming in habbo, and when actual random number generators (dice) were limited in a effort to curtail gambling was used I lieu of dice but wasnt visible or verified as part of the game engine to actually be random in the specified way.

Do you have any sources that aren't videos? Curious about this, but don't care enough to sit through 10 minute videos.

In any case I don't see any issues with something being "politically incorrect", unless that's a euphemism for something else.

If I were to wager a guess PI here means straight out nazi imagery.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pools-closed

That sounds innocuous.

and yet you're wrong...

Actually they aren't, even if that video doesn't reference it. Internet Historian did a piece on 4chan invading habbo hotel and forming swastikas out of people standing in a pattern and blocking doors so people couldn't leave, etc.

They were talking about the video.

You assume they're talking about the video, I think we're talking about the claim in general (which the video was just evidence of an example). It doesn't really matter which one of us is right, as I was just trying to add to the conversation with additional information.

> a character derived from a well-timed screenshot of a /b/blocker standing behind a bronze duck statue, and Swastiget, which refers to the group staging of a line formation in the shape of a swastika to anger the site's moderators.

Um, so about that....

> Habbo (formerly Habbo Hotel) is an online community aimed at teens and young adults. (...) Founded in 2000, Habbo has expanded to nine online communities (or "hotels"), with users from more than 150 countries.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo

It's looks like a clone of https://bondee.com

Why address it? This is part of the fun of these online games. Ultima Online had similar issues, except you could straight up kill people.

Looks like the key difference is that there are no corporate-generated unique/scarce items (that increase in value) as everybody is able to create everything themselves.

Based on the first video at least, Habbo Hotel looks like it has almost nothing in common with rooms.xyz.

I was thinking the same. Maybe if there was multiplayer, it could be a hangout space? But hangout and do what.

Teens mostly game online together, so the rooms could be a portal for accessing some kind of shared resource (private music or video colection, logins to other sites). Or it could be turned into a game itself and a fun collab space to polish a game in-universe

The video about anarcho capitalism on Habbo is mind blowing. Turns out to be one of the most effective demonstrations I've seen of what kind of hell an anarcho capitalist society would be.

I'm a bit confused by the video, because it mentions several times that the Habbo staff actually did impose restrictions (attempting to shut down casinos). So perhaps under-regulated capitalism is more accurate. Which is also similar to what we have in real life

Minors gambling, scam giveaways, predatory practices, classism, etc, happened even before Habbo imposed any restriction, hence anarcho capitalism.

After Habbo imposed some minor restriction on gambling (forced by the swedish state), players went from "official" casinos to underground casinos, using tricks to bypass said restrictions.

Right, this is not anarcho-capitalism though, this is just capitalism with an underground economy

No, it is anarcho capitalism as it comprised all the elements of capitalism without any "state" like hierarchy. As the video explains, Habbo dropped all of its moderators in favor of a slur censoring AI, so there was effectively no regulation in place except for slurs.

Restrictions on gambling only came later on, and that's when it possibly stopped being anarcho-capitalism.

I think where those videos (at least the first one) miss the mark is where they assume the ones running the systems to scam kids are also kids. Some were, I'm sure (kids have to grow out of being sociopaths or having sociopathic behavior IMO, and it happens at different rates for different people), but usually what happens is that adults move in that do this stuff as a living and just run enough scams concurrently to make enough money

Any assumption that an ecosystem meant for children is entirely children when there is money to be extracted is very flawed.

What an absurd and loaded commentary. Doesn't any game that involves currency and some kind of economy 'turn players into capitalists'? And couching that as a bad thing implicitly...

Well, that was messed up. Thanks for sharing, I had never heard of habbo hotel until now.

> literally "Habbo Hotel"

Where is it written?

> Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field.

> Kids are the easiest demography to scam. It also teaches them at an early age how to scam people

Who teach values to the kids are the parents, not a website. Kids don't learn to scam or to be anarcho capitalists playing such games but instead observing their parents.

Well this is wrong. I learned the intricacies of CSS and HTML in 2006/2007 at the age of 12 by learning to create pixel perfect phishing pages for Habbo Hotel. (A fact I’m certainly not proud of but does make me a bit of a domain expert nonetheless.) My parents didn’t teach me that.

The learn this by observing other players.

Then people say: So then ban First person shooters, and then people argument: "Oh I play call of duty and don't shoot anyone in real life". So what? Do everyone get influenced by games or just those that - for instance - didn't have strong parents, teaching them things like values, empathy and etc?

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