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Comment by bstsb | Hacker News Reader

your own source quotes as following:

> To use Communication features like Experience chat, Voice chat, and Party chat, all users must successfully complete an age check.

your words were "They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts". which they have. all "non age verified accounts" cannot use chat.

i have never attempted to assert that Roblox is a completely safe platform, or indeed that their safety team is as effective as it could be - however, your flippant statements were provably untrue with any research.

as for Schlep - while i applaud his stated aims, he was effectively "baiting" predators, offering to move conversations off-Roblox through platforms like Discord to bypass the moderation enforced by Roblox. in general, i fundamentally hate the idea of predator hunters; it seems so strange to monetize justice in this way, especially when it seems they care more about the content than the outcome of their "cases"

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I should've worded this better. By "non-verified accounts" I mean basically mean "accounts that haven't been verified by an ID check". This is the only means that I consider an actual verification, face/photo scan is a PR stunt and malicious compliance.

I assume I don't have to try too hard to convince someone on this forum how easy photo/video verification is to bypass. Look at Australia, it's happening en masse right now.

Most age verification systems guard against children pretending to be adults. If we're talking about social media, this is a fairly low stakes thing, and false positives aren't too critical - sure, a teen will bypass the Instagram age-check and use Instagram, big deal.

Here you're trying to guard against the exact opposite - adults pretending to be children. Not only are the stakes way higher as there's no legitimate reasons to try and bypass the system, you also don't have access to the only reliable method - government ID checks.

Edit: I can concede the point about Schlep, as what he does is dangerous and I could see someone "follow in his footsteps" and ge thurt. However you have to keep in mind that he's never the first to talk to these people -- there's so many of them that he's literally had dozens of them approach him. I was mainly thinking of Ruben Sim, who compiled a large database of NSFW accounts without any real world interaction, and was banned and sued for it.

yeah, i agree with your points on age verification. ironically, the main backlash from the Roblox community was that they were even rolling out verification in the first place - not that it didn't go far enough! i'm sure you'll agree it's a tricky problem to solve - if communication is fully banned, then many children will simply move to lesser-moderated platforms.

i'm not a Ruben Sim fan. while his list of "ERPing" accounts is a good idea, and it's amazing to see real games implement blocks on these players, i find his opinions on the furry community strange and a bit obsessive

Parent accounts require an ID [1].

Kids don't have ID. How would that work?

I think one approach would be that all communication features could be opt in, by parents. but, that doesn't actually "solve" anything, since predators just make child accounts for themselves, and opt in.

sounds like your solution would have to be "no children communicate on the internet".

[1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407282410644-I...

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