Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse
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Recent and related: Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477 - Nov 2025 (96 comments)
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Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.
You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.
We had Nintendo, but those games had an ending. Today's online games don't end.
the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.
the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.
I have children, they have friends. None of them have asked for Robux as a gift.
They play the free games together, chatting after school (and homework!) and stop if they hit a payment limit.
Kids can't be trapped by "dark patterns" into paying, they don't have credit cards or money to spend. It's always the parents who give in.
Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.
Decades ago, kids might have met in unsafe areas as well: maybe hang out in an abandoned building or whatever. But there wasn't yet a trillion dollar business deliberately creating abandoned buildings to hang out in.
Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.
Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.
Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.
Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.
Stroads and parking lots galore ain't all that appealing (or safe) to play in.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
Thankfully my son and his friends have somehow iterated away from Fortnite. It's no longer cool so they just stopped playing it. That's one less thing I have to worry about.
She gets along just fine without Roblox.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.
Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.
You mean Microsoft.
edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)
Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.
So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?
Screw it.
And many of those mods at worse might have a donation link if any kind of monetary discussion at all.
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
Unity makes money as usual, the people doing those games pay their professional licenses to Unity.
Roblox is a dystopian nightmare in comparison.
The subsequent versions also developed the game mechanics a lot to turn it into something closer to an RPG than the early, bare-bones sandbox game with minimal, well-understood mechanics and the rest purely up to the players' creativity.
There's nowadays an abundance of Pay-to-Win servers with custom mechanics to enable that, and I'm sure a lot of unsavory people preying on children. The social media (YouTube/etc) community around it has exploded too in a way I don't recall it before (I used to be into Minecraft videos back in the ~2012 era, and what I see nowadays grosses me out in comparison).
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/lacoste-x-minecraft
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Universal_Studios_Event
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-the-hell-do-you-throw-a-m...
The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.
With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
I think the problem is that either you can give children freedom to explore the world, or you can make them accountable for their actions. Can't have both, and parents will protect their kids by not letting them get into trouble.
https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highes...
https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom and came into adulthood with a bunch of wonderful warm memories of our childhoods, free of any stigmas or psychological trumas.
This modern fear-based attitude towards childhood is beyond sick.
Now before anyone says "but pedophiles and terrorists" - mind you, that was 80's USSR, Chikatilo had still been at large, the gossip was there but wasn't amplified enough to put everyone into scared trance like modern mass-media does.
Literally nothing has changed in the society since then, maniacs were around just like they are now, but the attitude towards the outside world has been so blown out of proportion today, that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
This kind of approach is also invalid. So what everyone plays Fortnite? There are many places to get socialized with other kids. The kid likes basketball? Sign him up to a basketball team; he likes to play music? Sign him to some band; etc. Kids shouldn't surrender to peer pressure.
I agree schools are also a problem, but not the main problem.
If so, was it a problem that you didn't listen?
I'm not a parent, but fortnite is not like smoking or drugs, common. If you don't let kids grow over this kind of bad content, they will never become good discriminators.
What show did you like when you were a kid? Do you still like it? Are you eager to consume it in the same amount as you did? If not, it means you grew over it.
When I was a child I loved the Monkey Island series, completing them several times a year. Solving the puzzles made feel smart, and the jokes made me chuckle. But now? I could hardly complete the high-res remakes or even the latest title. The puzzles are either too simple or just nonsensical try-and-error, I find the story boring and shallow (compared to other content I consume now), and none of the jokes really hit the spot anymore.
South Park even has an episode about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRFQ_333_Y
I think forbidding kids to access content they crave is wrong and cruel, as you are basically forbidding them from exploring their tastes, forbidding them from becoming interesting adults with refined and deep tastes.
Even in the case of alcohol, I think people should explore it and their limits (getting wasted) when they are young. I have an aunt who never tried alcohol until she was in her 40s, and she went through the same phases as teenagers; however, at that age getting too drunk too often has serious social consequences. She spiraled out of control, becoming alcoholic, and then later addicted to other drugs. I am not a psychology expert, but I always thought that her problem was that she was too old to explore this path.
In my country we have an idiom I like: "potro que no galopa, de caballo se desboca", which means "colts that don't gallop become wild horses".
I don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.
(and actually explains why the CEO this article is about feels like its not his problem, because as long as people keep pointing fingers in the wrong direction for our legal system, then the CEO and Roblox corporation will be impervious and their efforts seen as sufficient)
Console access could also be required to create new accounts. The article says it is currently trivial for kids to just create an adult account and bypass all the parental controls.
There is probably some way you could toy-ify it and sell a lot of units
The original solution to just playing with local friends was LAN parties, but private servers were great too where they were actually private/hosted entirely by the players and not just part of some corporation's online platform.
It doesn't even have to be super cryptographically secured against someone getting their own code off of it, since that's probably beyond most children.
You would want to make sure that people can't just sniff them or something though.
* kids play with other kids with same school, worst that can happen is learning some fun words from upper classmate * both teacher and parents can join and play or keep an eye on them * with a bit more it could be segregated to per class /grade server too
Edit: There’s two problems that need to be solved. Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time. And corporations need to prioritize safety more than they do now. It dumbfounds me how many times I get called the N word on Xbox and nothing happens after I report it. It’s almost 2026, it’s not that hard people.
Hard habit to kill given that so many also offload many of the responsibilities to schools
That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).
It was fucking great.
And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option
> Understanding how attractive Roblox would be to predators, the company long ago could have blocked unrestricted contact between adults and minors.
Contact here seems to be about DMs or equivalent, since I don't think grooming and kidnapping preparations are happening in public forums? So with or without involvement of a physical key-exchange, I'd say that curbing private personal contact is the crux, and it's easily doable without effecting other aspects of the game
By his own admission the controls which companies have been pressured to implement thus far are incomplete / can be bypassed.
There is of course only one, complete solution that comes to mind - universal digital ID for all humans on the internet - which is a different kind of nightmare. But we can’t have that conversation because the author won’t stake out their position there.
We don't need to prescribe what they ought to do. It's sufficient to say what we have here is unacceptable and make fixing it be a them problem.
If that didn't happen with pornography websites in the 90s/2000s it's probably not happening now.
if any of your friends are playing the game and the server is not full, they already try to put you in the same server
Casey Newton is a journalist - it would not be appropriate for him to have a "position" on this topic.
But more broadly, all journalism is necessarily axiologically loaded. Why report on X but not on Y? Obviously, because the journalist/editor/owner thinks X is "newsworthy" while Y isn't.
Whether that means proposing a solution is another question. I can sympathize with annoyance at nonconstructive complaining, however.
Whatever the technical/legal solution, I think an important factor is also parental involvement. If Roblox is dangerous enough, don't let your kids use it. They might get around your ban, but at least you did your part. That means a great deal already. And people circumvent and break the law all the time, but that doesn't invalidate the law, and parents are lawgivers.
Just because proposing a solution would be helpful, that doesn’t require he propose a solution.
Related, sometimes articulating a question in the right way is the hard part.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-...
Anyone hear any excerpts from Thiel’s Antichrist lectures? I’ve never been on the same page as him politically but this wasn’t “wow I really disagree” material. This was “are you… okay, man?” material. It was just askew and bizarre. I’m not a big Thunberg fan either but I cannot replicate the thought process that would lead to mentioning her as a potential Antichrist prototype. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing, just the easiest to explain.
One thing I learned way back in college: if someone seems like they are on drugs, they may be on drugs.
Either that or these guys are in some weird echo chambers.
Source: used drugs extensively.
I know he doesn't like Greta, I don't either.
But I didn't see his lecture, he theorizes that she may be the antichrist? lol
I'm more shocked he's been around in the industry for 20 years and still hasn't learned media discipline. All he had to do was be a little empathetic and explain how they were doing everything they can do keep kids safe. Would have just been another run of the mill CEO interview.
Interviewer: "so I heard you were/are doing a bad job with moderation"
CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time
Repeat.
I mean, at no point did the CEO say anything interesting about the moderation problem or what they are doing. The interviewers seem too skeptical to be genuinely interested. He explains to them that cost =/= quality and that 2016 =/= 2025 for what feels like an eternity. I was bored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
So historically, when someone accepted an interview yet refused to engage with any questions, or stay on topic, AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation.. it was considered unhinged and obviously crazy behavior.
If interviewee acts clueless, drawling, or drooling then they could be pretty uncooperative and mostly get a pass because it's not very polite to point out stupidity. But for the big bonus crazy-points though, interviewee may opt in to escalation, becoming unabashedly and almost childishly combative, talking over each other, etc. Obviously all of these tactics are pretty normalized now though.
> I was bored.
This is basically the goal. After the interviewee realizes the interviewer is hostile, they just double down on their talking points to signal to investors and ignore the intended audience of the interviewer. Mistake on the interviewers part honestly to publish it at that point IMO.
> AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation..
I agree this is a big part of it and would add that the "unhinged" look is probably just a lack of PR skill. Both sides are hostile but the interviewers "win" here by staying within the rules of the game, and they also do a beautiful job of sort of winking at the audience like "wow this dude is crazy right?"
It's impressive but sorta annoying, I'd rather listen to actual content.
doesn't talk about the thing they want
It is redundant and I don't think it is a trainwreck either
Genuinely insane that it's legal. Full dark gambling patterns, insane access. I think the only reason it's not been regulated is that people haven't looked closely, but it's as if someone took the worst of gacha games and decided to base their childrens platform on it.
My kid plays Roblox, I prevent her from talking to others, and I police the Robux purchases. It really is a fun platform. The problem is for parents that aren't technical, or are negligent and don't know how to police it.
- You cannot prevent your child to login and play at least 15mn (without manually resetting the password in the kid account) - combine this with the fact you cannot prevent changing the password reset email on the child account, and in practice you cannot prevent your child from using roblox - You cannot prevent gift card to be used - There's no way to trace gift cards usage at all - Roblox will remove controls at some ages without warning you - Deleting your kid account is a fight (it's been two weeks and roblox is asking me proof of ownership I cannot give since they don't exist) - You cannot prevent fear of missing out - You cannot control pay to win games - You cannot prevent your child face to be scanned and shared for "age control" - Same for your own face - Probably more...
Oh and don't forget there's absolutely no way to prevent your kid to have multiple accounts, and have a parallel life you know nothing about.
determined resourceful kids will do what they want. so long as I talk about the risks and dangers and put up a modicum of effort to police it, I'm fine if they figure out ways around it. some people have to learn the hard way.
letting kids roam entirely free is a remnant of the 80s and a bit of the 90s.
I feel like this argument has become a cliche in itself. Sometimes things are worth panicking about, and limiting access to things like cigarettes or gambling for children has been a real benefit to society. The same could be true for the dark patterns listed above.
Restrictions are fine, to a point. Making something entirely illegal to save the children is a moral panic induced reaction, in my experience.
Anyone can make a Roblox game and publish it, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of moderations or verification going on. And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways.
I had blocked chat on my kid's account and thought I was ok. Then I see her playing one game and ask her what she's doing. She says she's updating her character status (description etc) to talk to other players.
Roblox do actually takes down violent content, in reality. But that is never the important part.
Gambling and facilitating sexual predation is probably worth regulating, but I don't find tasteless jokes a sufficient cause for intervention.
Nor is this even a remotely new phenomenon. I was on Newgrounds as a pre-teenager when people were making wacky flash games about school shootings and 9/11.
Honestly the voice comms have been a nice upgrade and I find I mind it a lot less than text. It's a lot easier to confirm the person on the other side is not some middle aged creep. It's also a lot more ergonomic for talking with friends (though they already tend to use facetime calls in the background)
The grooming going on there is a real problem. At least more awareness for parents would be a good thing.
In the same way if a casino advertised child roulette wheels, I'd want legislation to step in.
Roblox is really really weird.
Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754#32015542
I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.
> I am watching YouTubers showing these things for years to the public.
I'm confused, aren't "YouTubers who make videos about the problem" people? They seem to care so much that they've put money, time, and energy into creating videos illustrating the problem.
At a certain point, you need to have a statute that says "thou shalt not offer cybersex and online gambling to children", and you need someone with the statutory authority to charge Roblox with doing so and penalize them after due process. Either we don't have that statute, or the people with the statutory authority don't enforce things like they should.
I think parenting is one aspect, but surely you see how given it's a platform that advertises itself specifically for children, in the same way as if there was a children channel on the TV telling your kids to smoke crack, maybe someone should step in
Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.
Perfect summer night and there is not a person to be seen. They felt like they were walking around in some kind of zombie horror movie that all the people had vanished.
It feels as though people slowly learned that they could get away with not introducing themselves to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner, and other activities that were once assumed.
Anecdata but I think this is what the parent comment is asserting anyway.
As compared to what I heard from the older neighbors, when they had kids, all the others around also had kids. So many in fact that all the neighbors had doors in their backyards that opened into all the other neighbors yards, so the kids would just run around without having to go into the streets.
His son is eleven. Every Saturday he goes to tennis class. He's good at it, sure, but the important part is that he loves it.
One Saturday, though, he refused to go.
Why? Because there was a special Roblox event happening at the same time.
His father tried reasoning with him, the kid, agrees, a bit reluctantly.
But when the father walks into the bar, he sees a dozen kids all locked to their screens, playing the same Roblox event.
Roblox is an obvious form of manipulation, but honestly, we're not much better. Adults scroll under the influence of algorithmic dopamine loops. If the tobacco class action was once the benchmark for corporate harm, it may someday look tiny compared to what's coming (I hope).
The problem outlined in the article is about moderation of spaces where kids are present. You seem to be trying to draw some broader conclusion that video games are harmful.
Broadcast TV (UHF/VHF) was exclusive timed events which gave everyone FOMO, at least until the VCR became commonplace and affordable.
That gave you the ability to time-shift, as long as you could figure out how to set your VCR clock.
Roblox is designed from the ground up to sell Robux. Not to promote fun games or anything interesting in the least.
The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
The events have also caused massive arguments and begging and pleading at my house since Roblox is rarely allowed (and would never be allowed if I had my way...)
There’s at least two whole genre of games like this: idle games, and the more aggressive gacha games (which more often let you pay to win). I guess the differentiator with Roblox is the social aspect.
I do think pay to win is a problem, FWIW.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Those games are pointless too though? As are nearly all games.
There’s legitimate criticisms of Roblox moderation and the business model. But games are games, and I feel like criticism of some Roblox-specific issues are getting entangled with normal gaming behavior. I get that you may not love to see kids who ignore you when they’re engrossed in a game, but that’s just how games are. Limit game time if it’s a problem, and/or make them earn their own money for pay-to-win junk. You’re the parent.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Frankly, Doom was pointless for christ sake, as pointless as it gets. And yes, obviously a game appealing to 8-12 years old is pointless to a teenager or adult. No, kids wont play the grandpa games. And yes, they do not want to play only games adults deemed educational or training whatever you think counter strike trains enough. They play them literally because they find those games fun.
I play Roblox with my 9 year old, and no, they're not anymore brain rot than DOOM or Quake deathmatches were. Capture the flag or tower defense was almost never the point. It was being first in a deathmatch.
Quite frankly today's Roblox games tend to be a lot more enlightening, innovative and entertaining. Not all of course but many.
I never said video games are harmful. I talked about manipulation of people of all ages at a planetary scale.
(The moderation problems in the article are clearly a new and separate issue that needs to be dealt with.)
I bet adult tennis instructors get a lot of cancellations on Super Bowl Sunday. In certain circles, you're going to have a hard time scheduling a screen-free dinner party on Oscar night, or opposite the finale of a hit TV show.
And I don't want to defend Roblox, their laissez faire attitude towards predators abusing their platform is abhorrent and disgusting. But this anecdote is about as old as civilization.
Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished.
Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished.
NOTHING CHANGES UNTIL BAD LEADERS ARE PUNISHED.
I'm all ears as to how to get this going.
You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
If someone was selling drugs on the street on the way to school, would we be blaming parents who let their kids walk to school that they should parent better, or would we deal with the drug dealer?
This is patently untrue. We are exposed to risk, incl. death, from products and services every day. Nothing can be 100% safe, nor would it be wise to aim for it. The benefits, as they say, often outweigh the cost.
I’ll keep this in mind the next time I pick up some acetylene or muriatic acid.
If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." I don't get why so many folks are willing to say that with harms caused by tech companies.
Scale is no excuse either, "at our scale we just can't handle all the content." If anything it makes the problem more pressing to address.
But we do! Acute harm is bad but chronic harm is, apparently, fine.
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.
1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.
2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.
etc etc.
I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.
1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.
2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.
3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.
4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.
As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.
So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.
What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"
Isn't that how moralizing about the health benefits of a McDonalds-based diet go?
Mass abuse of hundreds of millions for profit >>>> minor abuse for sadistic or sexual gratification. It's a true shame that only complaints of the latter have been normalized, but for entirely the wrong reasons punishing "evildoers", rather than preventing harm. When social morals are so warped society becomes unable to protect children which can only hasten the collapse of society.
Punitive justice only seems to work, mainly it relies on people fearing that their harmful actions will be punished, if people believe their actions aren't harmful they will do them and punitive justices' appearance of success disappears.
Need I remind you that the game wouldn't exist without exploiting unpaid child labor? I feel I must, because the only comment of 332 pointing it out has low opacity. Is it any wonder that a software platform designed around exploiting children has users engaging in child exploitation?
Does it ask them to buy Robux? Yup, sure does, just like many apps they encounter. IMO it's a learning opportunity.
As far as safety I consider it my job to monitor them when on their devices, be present.
There's no getting around that there's no magic system that will protect kids for sure, other than parental involvement.
I did grow up gambling pogs and MTG cards. I did grow up getting verbally sexually harassed at a Chuck-e-cheese. I did grow up finding my uncle's porno mag collection.
I also did grow up playing Ultima Online with a group of people who knew I was a kid and helped and guided me through some really hard times with compassion.
It's easy to focus on the amplification these platforms have on all the negative parts of our society. And it's a valid criticism . But it also should equally amplify the positive outcomes that occur from finding a community when you live in a bad situation or one with limited positive outcomes.
As usual education is key here and unfortunately our education system (and parents) will never be able to keep up with the pace of advancement. There is no room for nuance or gray areas in our society, everything is too polarized and personal responsibility is non existent.
I also gave lectures and installed FamilyLink and put restrictions on my router to prevent my child from accessing devices in a way I didn't approve of or when I couldn't adequately supervise it. The sneaky little shit still found ways to circumvent all this both here at home and at school. My child completely ignored all the warnings and eventually got roped into talking to a very sick predatory individual over Roblox.
The Roblox creep convinced my child to sign up for Instagram where they were able to get on video calls often. They then made my child watch them do very disturbing things, including attempting to hang themselves, cutting themselves open, and other very sick shit that I would have never imagined. They then threatened my child that if it was reported, they would kill our entire family. This went on for a couple of years apparently and we're still dealing with the trauma and fallout of it years later. Authorities were unable to determine the identity of the individual due to the many layers of obfuscation (fake names, VPN usage, etc).
I'm a software engineer of nearly 20 years and very knowledgeable of tech. The fact that this still happened despite my many roadblocks and safe-guards I put in place really shocked me to the core. Not to mention the whole "am I terrible parent" question which naturally arises out of all this. I've been reassured that I did everything I could reasonably do to prevent it, but that question always weighs on my mind regardless.
I warn every parent I can to keep their kids off Roblox and other "community driven" games that are like this.
EDIT: and if you're wondering where the initial exposure to Roblox came from, it was from an Android tablet I had at the time which was setup strictly for kids games (hence the FamilyLink with time limits and stuff)
I don't want to kick you when you're down, but you tried a technical solution on a human problem.
It could very well be that I'm being naive, or even stupid, but from what I could see the panic is coming from parents who don't feel like being parents. That is to say, they think the world should be safe for their kids, with no actual responsibility required from them to educate and engage with their own children.
It feels they didn't have shame from the movies I remember watching as I was growing up in the 90s/00s?
I remember this one vividely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4WOo8IJzVg
Communication capabilities were merely a tertiary concern - after monetization.
By trash I basically mean either porn or gambling. By porn I don’t just mean the sexual kind but also political rage porn, etc. By gambling I mean anything that exploits the kinds of dopamine hooks that a slot machine exploits. There are many variations of these things but those are the basic forms.
Those are the kinds of things you get if you optimize for engagement.
You also get more predators and trolls because those are the kinds of people who create the most engaging content.
This isn’t new. It’s been known since mass media was invented. “If it bleeds it leads,” the P.T. Barnum principle of “any publicity is good publicity,” and so on.
What I think is new is the degree of individualized hyper optimization two way digital platforms allow. They let us turn this so far up that apps on a little pocket computer can start rivaling cigarettes for addictive qualities and psychological harm.
it's really interesting to me seeing the debate around age verification from both sides. many Roblox developers and users seems to think that it's the end of the platform:
> Awesome! We love mandatory identity checks and age verification on every major social platform. Nobody needs privacy online. Thank you Roblox.
> No just no. This won’t work, this is too enforcing on the users and greatly invades our privacy
and then on the other side we have people saying it's a token gesture that doesn't go far enough:
> It could have adopted age verification before a wave of state legislation signaled that it would soon become mandatory anyway
my personal view on the matter is that, while age verification certainly reduces privacy, it was basically the only option left for Roblox to pursue - it's a move that absolutely will reduce child abuse on their platforms, and make it safer for kids to play online.
they also have one of the best privacy policies for age verification around.
(for context, they delete facial geometry immediately and store IDs for 30 days maximum. one alternative, Persona, used to hold IDs for up to six years, and currently have no set time limit on how long they keep other personal information)
Playing an online game under your own name exposes you to entirely new and massively more acute level of risk practically immediately. Absolutely no way I would allow my kids to give their real names to a game.
it wouldn't be the ugliest problem-reaction-solution history has seen...
They play in the lounge and I can keep a bit of an eye on what they're doing.
Most of roblox is a trash fire, but there a couple of games that seem pretty fun when used as an activity for the kids to get together and chat and play.
My 15 year old does this. I thought it was interesting, he and his friends just start a call, put it on speaker, and then talk to each other while gaming.
My youngest (now 13) played a lot of Roblox when he was younger but lost interest. We’ve talked a lot about the risks and how robux is a scam, he’s even run across “gooners” in game. It reminds me of hanging out at the mall with my friends when I was his age. Plenty of risk there and you need to know how to deal with it. I remember once being offered a ride home by a stranger, the total child kidnapping stereotype, I just said something like “is this a joke?” and they took off.
Definitely the larger vibe in tech at the moment. Safety is overwhelmingly not a priority, anywhere, to any leader, no matter how loudly specific proponents scream that "ahkshually, it is."
Thing is, I taste the Kool-Aid each company offers. From tiny businesses to a household name SV enterprise, I give each the benefit of the doubt that this time, they're doing things right. This time, they're taking safety seriously. This time, they care about their employees. I really, truly, sincerely tried giving them all the benefit of the doubt that they see things I don't.
After this past forced career change, I finally gave up that exercise in futility. Actions speak infinitely louder than words, and taking stock of the actions of these people reveal their true intentions every time: as much money as possible for them, fuck everyone else.
Hmm… okay, is it power that turns off your empathy nodes? Money? Were they always unempathetic? This is a genuine concern, because humans are literally wired for empathy with our kin, even if we consider tribal rivalries.
So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church.
Roblox has a strange demographic problem. Their average user age is around 14. They keep trying to push that up, at least to high school age where there's more spending power. Or so said one of their annual reports. But they just can't retain the early teens into the high school years.
This is the same problem as Chat Control. You let people talk, sometimes they're going to talk about things they're Not Supposed To Talk About. The amount of censorship needed to prevent this goes way beyond Orwell ever dreamed of. Roblox claims a goal of cutting off wrongspeak within 100ms. They're trying pretty hard. That's a concern - an AI listening to everything you say and evaluating it for political correctness.
Kids have been able to access Pornhub, etc. for more than a decade, and not much seems to have happened. Teen sex is down, not up. The graphics in Roblox are so bad that sex there is silly, not obscene, anyway.
This belongs to a long series of non-problems, along with the Hayes Code, the 1950s Congressional hearings on comic books, the Meese Report, and such. Amusingly, we aren't hearing much from the religious right any more; they aligned with MAGA, and now they're stuck defending Trump's sex life.
If anything, the Roblox problem is a subset of the too much screen time problem.
Yep. I’ve not witnessed something so wildly over exaggerated since D&D was responsible for widespread satanic cults in the 80’s.
One of the comments above has a video of a guy arrested and admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.. that doesn’t sound like just some sort of over exaggerated panic.
> So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church.
It wasn’t immediate obvious when those were occurring only years later.. so most likely we are seeing the tip of the iceberg.
People were definitely harmed, psychically, and physically - straight up to torture in 'conversion therapies' and death, over the D&D (and related RPG) hysteria.
Have you ever played online games? "Contacting several kids a day" is how internet chat works. I'm sure if it was up to you kids would only be able to play single player games and stay inside, god forbid they get struck by lightning or eaten by a polar bear.
What do you want gaming to do? Have a checkbox where you swear you're not a pedophile or something? That's on-par for most of these idiotic suggestions of how people seem to fucking think the internet and gaming works, and what sort of actual solution is viable.
Roblox tracks all the chat and hands it over to law enforcement and NCMEC. They restrict chat for . They give ample parental controls to limit chat/friends/interactions. Now they're adding AI-powered age validation (which I think is a terrible idea) just to appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk, nor apparently have the ability to teach your kids "hey maybe don't talk to creepy strangers who want you to send them images and give them your home address?"
Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well
Posts about climate change, Israel/Palestine, uncomfortable concerns about the state of the industry etc will very often disappear quickly once they hit the home page.
Of course silence about climate change is beneficial for those contributing the most to it, silence about Israel/Palestine is very beneficial to Israel, and clearly silence about lack of concern for child safety by major tech companies benefits those companies.
What more can be said about the matter? Some pro-palestine organization will accuse Israel of genocide, and Israelis will continue bulldozing inch by inch.
As for "uncomfortable concerns about the state of the industry", those are on the front page and top of /active regularly
... violates the guidelines, in particular:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Didn't they grow up in an age unrestricted web either? By now we must have two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe World of Warcraft, MSN, Whatsapp and ICQ. Oh and the p0rn... I mean, seriously, do you guys have nothing else to do than to moderate your kids Minecraft servers?
My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.
And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.
The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.
Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.
Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.
When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").
My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.
When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads.
To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.
My sons started playing Roblox a month ago. I allow only half an hour time limit, so that they are not get cut from their friends, no friend that they don't know in person and no cent spent for bullshit objects.
Unlimited unattended hovering in Roblox, among others, is recipe for disaster.
We’ve dispensed with ethics as a basis for human interaction, and the results are exactly what one would expect: a dystopia.
And the people making the most money off this system insist that it’s all for the best and that we should double down on this strategy. Any mention of putting limits on greed and exploitation is met with responses like, “what are you, a socialist?” as if the only two choices for structuring a society are either a rapacious hyper-exploitative capitalism and an oppressive Soviet state, and there’s no other option.
Capitalism needs constraints. Capitalism in the service of society can be a great thing. Capitalism without constraints is a cancer that will destroy everything in the pursuit of profit.
The human brain is loaded with exploits, and capitalism being an excellent optimizer quickly finds and uses these exploits. Because they work, and more importantly they are way way easier than creating actual value.
A casino is more profitable than a hospital. Quack medicine sold with sensationalism is more profitable than real medicine. Porn is more profitable than good film or literature. Rage inducing click bait is more profitable than actual news or thoughtful editorial. It’s kind of just thermodynamics. These things require less energy input, and they don’t have to “work” because they exploit security vulnerabilities in the dopamine system instead.
We are hacking each other to death.
I don't really think that culture has existed lately, it kind of died out with the 2008 financial crisis. Now it's about naked use of power, whether political or economic.
The problem with constraints on individual freedom (which is essentially what happens when you constrain capitalism) is that no one agrees on what they should be, and therefore a segment of society will not be happy with them, and claim them as tyrannical oppression. Sometimes this is hysterical nonsense, sometimes it has a point.
Ultimately the antidote to unfettered capitalism is sensible policy crafted through political compromise. But largely Western politics itself has skewed towards extremes lately, few have the patience or understanding for this process, they want a quick fix.
I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.
But "regulated" capitalism inevitably leads to crony capitalism.
What we've arrived at can barely even be called capitalism, and old school capitalism paved the way:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220331174542/https://nymag.com...
What is capitalism in service of society?
Unfortunately nuance is kind of lost in today's politics.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
until you find a way to legally tie off-platform behavior, such as on Discord, or the comment sections of a community, back to the platform Roblox itself, all CEOs are going to feel impervious and seem tone-deaf to lawsuits and the media
and it is factually impervious, Roblox' moderation tactics are comprehensive, the legal system goes after the people caught sexually harassing children, the same as how the legal system would go after someone caught sexually harassing children at Chuck E Cheese as opposed to Chuck E Cheese itself or the parking lot outside where the skaters happened to be hanging out
"but it's different and I'm a parent and it makes me uneasy" okay, heard.
I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.
This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.
I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"
Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?
That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.
This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.
I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:
Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.
Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.
This is a great quote and puts to words how viscerally appalled I am at Zuck’s sanctimonious exculpations.
Very Trump-like
CEOs acting like selfish psychopaths indifferent to the suffering of others shouldn't really surprise anyone at this point. Why expect tech CEOs to act differently? Of course he's nothing but annoyed that people keep complaining about how his digital child casino allows pedophiles and corporate advertisers to prey on children without oversight, or about how he's exploiting children for labor, or about how he's psychologically manipulating kids to feel anxiety and FOMO so that he can sell them more Robux. If he were capable of empathy for the victims of his platform he wouldn't have designed his platform to create victims in the first place. He doesn't give a shit about the safety of children, he only cares about himself and how much money he's making.