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Comment by ciarlill | Hacker News Reader

I didn't grow up with Roblox.

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.

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Education will not be enough. They actually teach about this stuff in school and give plenty of warnings believe it or not.

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.

> 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 don't want to kick you when you're down, but you tried a technical solution on a human problem.

I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Can you elaborate on what a "human" solution would be in your mind? For us, it was a combination of technical, educational, and traditional parenting as well as some therapy for other behavioral issues exhibited in school. We had after-school classes and sports. We played board games as a family. From our perspective, we were doing things correctly in both the technical and human aspect of it to make sure it never got to that point, yet it still happened.

It could of course be simply down to the fact that all children are different, but what worked for us is honesty and the closeness that brought.

I've see parents "talk" with their children, where it seemed more like they were talking _at_ them. I could see in the kids face he was putting on a show of listening (and pretending to go along with it), because that was the fastest track to going back to doing whatever he liked when they weren't watching.

Where it worked though, was getting closer to my children by admitting where I was at and where I was coming from. When they feel like you're really connecting with them.

I'm sure my kids still get up to much I'll (hopefully) never hear about, but that's normal. As long as the big overarching stuff is understood, I'll take that as a win.

Given what this person has gone through, if you want to be critical then I think you owe us a more detailed explanation what exactly would have worked better. Armchair parenting is very easy.

Out of curiosity how did they manage to sign up for Instagram? Browser? Asking for a friend

Ah great question, I wondered this myself as there was no phone involved here (in our household) and Instagram has been banned on my network for many years. It was from a friend's phone at school and that same friend later provided my child with an old galaxy tab to bring home, which was cleverly hidden under the carpet beneath the bed with wifi access to our neighbor's internet (provided by neighbor's kid as well). It's amazing the lengths they'll go through to circumvent rules.

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)

Wow. Honestly if it weren't for the bad stuff I would be secretly proud of a kid like that.

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