If kids pay 5-10 bucks every once in a while to support their entertainment and pay engineering salaries… is that the worst thing in the world? I’d rather my kids play Roblox than scroll Instagram. One of those is “free”.
Roblox is like the #1 cesspool for bad shit going down with kids on the internet. Social media is bad as well, and my kids do neither. No, Roblox is not the end of the world, but there’s no real compelling reason to open up to it.
They play with their friends on XBox Live, with voice chat limited to friends we personally add.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s
I think there is a big difference to some of the examples they gave, because of the uniquely young age demographics on Roblox. The only example that seems comparable was Club Penguin.
Now, I agree that there is interest in teasing out whether there are problems with Roblox specifically, or if it is just a problem with having an online space with such a high concentration of kids in general. But that high concentration of kids does make it much more of a concern either way.
Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S
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.
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
What do you think that leads to?
Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.
Only some of Roblox is trying to get children addicted to gambling.
If this was a game that had a subscription fee or where you had to buy the new version every year, that might be true.
These games don’t work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual player. They’re designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you’re enticed to pay 5-10 bucks there, then you’re scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next thing.
Children, especially pre-teens, don’t have access to credit or money without their parents consent, and a pretty easy way to limit the amount of money your child can spent on Roblox is to just make them have to ask you to buy the in-game currency.
There are problems with the game but the amount of money going into it is something a parent can and should 100% control.
They don't work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual child. They're designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you're enticed to pay 5-10 bucks for another toy, then you're scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next toy.
Would you let your children go nuts at a casino? Or online with sports betting or crypto slots?
The problem isn't the $5-10. It's the psychological manipulation.
Teach kids that it’s the same kind of manipulation as in their games (and how to spot it) and perhaps they will be better equipped to not get fucked by adult life.
Where do the gambling tricks come in?
Fortnite is way better and safer.