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Comment by jswelker | Hacker News Reader

The most impressive thing about Roblox is how many predatory parties they have managed to pack into one children's platform. The company itself with its microtransactions, cash hungry creators with lowest common denominator and/or sexualized content, creepy adults behaving badly, probably some hostile foreign governments in all likelihood. Maybe add in a 4chan integration next just to cover a wider spectrum of villainy.

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There are parental controls that don’t seem to do much good at all. I set a filter so that my 6-year-old son would only see content that was rated for kids. The next thing I know I see he’s playing a prison riot simulator and having a shootout with the police. There were some appropriate games, but the screening just isn’t serious. When it’s game time, we pretty much stick to Mario and offline Minecraft.

I don’t think it’s serious in any platform of any scale. I remember having some pedo on AOL try to groom me as a 7(?) year old, except I was aware enough to punch out of the situation very quickly. The kind of thing basic keyword filters could have flagged and caught.

Similarly, I remember my families account being banned because I dared to say “Santa isn’t real” in a chat around the same timeframe.

Very serious administration for a billions dollar firm…

Hmm maybe the answer is that there should be no anonymous online platforms targeting children at all.

The problem is that verifying adulthood for the remaining online spaces risks making them non-anonymous as well.

Be sure not to pay for switch online. They bury a bunch of social media / data sharing opt-ins about halfway through the game, where parents will not discover them. (Look for Luigi to see if your kid opted in.)

It’s almost like age-appropriate is subjective. Roblox is primarily concerned with child safety when it comes to communication, and less about dictating what’s appropriate and not appropriate for arbitrary ages.

> Roblox is primarily concerned with child safety

It's not. In every possible context, it's not concerned with that.

Isn't Roblox owned by a publicly traded company? No shit they aren't concerned with child safety, that would cut into profits, which would make shareholders deeply upset.

Won't anyone think of the poor shareholders?

It absolutely categorically is.

Make sure you're up to date on this saga https://youtu.be/6dksQJulz4c and tell me again they care at all.

Oh it keeps getting better... https://kotaku.com/roblox-new-york-times-interview-baszucki-...

Tell me they care...

Also, disabling chat is insufficient because some Roblox experiences re-implement their own chat and ignore the parental controls setting.

I've implemented the per-day time limit and it's just broken? It's very hard to measure how much time has been spent on the day, their measure is often above the limit I set, and sometimes a low limit will trigger immediately.

It seems like the limit and time measurement is based on the US time zone alone, not the local time zone. We're in Australia and that's the only explanation I can think of.

If you're interested in a technical solution, Amazon Kids+ on Kindle seems to enforce time limits reasonably well, except for the camera.

Thanks :) I've gone back to just being vigilant, regular parenting; often joining the games myself. I can recommend 99 Nights In the Forest, nice simple survival-style game with very little in-your-face-monetization.

A 6 year old with internet access? Allowed to play multiplayer online games? Please tell me I'm hallucinating.

You aren't, but you might have woken up from a decade long coma. This isn't new at all.

Surely it's rare? "Abnormal"?

No. Common.

We can’t all be Mennonites. I wasn’t much older than that when my family got dial up Internet, and somehow I made it.

4chan would be looking in the wrong direction since it has nothing for kids. Other games and game-like experiences are probably just as bad as Roblox and just haven't been brought out into the light. I personally remember Gaia Online being pretty bad back when I was a teen.

Sure, but how many kids are currently hooked on Gaia Online? (Or 20 years ago for that matter?)

I will happily complain about these other just as bad games when I discover them, don't you worry ;)

There are hostile foriegn governments in Roblox? What for?

Now they’re trying to normalize mandatory “turn on the camera to access porn” services. Really?!?

As a parent, all I want is for the fucking thing to let zero people that I have not approved communicate with my kid in any way. This especially includes people that made games and gambling dens.

Also, influencers.

Stop giving them internet-access devices.

Truly. My daughter and her friends play a lot on it but only a few games and I always have an ear out for which ones because it’s such a cesspool.

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