Originally published at: More on Roblox's exploitation of children | Boing Boing
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"Note that since the original report, Roblox has grown from a $45bn company to a $65bn one. "
All publicity is good publicity. There is a large class of investors for whom the only reaction will be “That sounds like a profitable business model, let’s invest some money”.
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“Free child labor? Sign us up!”
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you realize there’s not an awful lot you can do about it.
It’s a computer game. As a parent you have the power to do everything about it.
also
I’m pretty sure it’s far more effective to enslave people through the use a dopamine (and the other neuro feel good chemicals) than violence. See: Roblox, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, ect…
That’s taking it a bit out of context… yes you can ban Roblox from your house, but you don’t have much power to do anything about Roblox’s practices. I think that’s the point being made. You can keep guns out of your house too, but often the problem is the influence these industries have on everyone else around you.
As the video concludes towards the end, a big problem is that parents and legislators don’t understand it… not even remotely. Roblox is making billions of dollars so they have no incentive to make it easier to understand, and they have a lot of money to put towards making it more opaque. So you’ve got this giant machine in motion with nothing standing in its way.
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you’re definitely wrong on that front. see, umm over three hundred years of prior history?
i know you’re just using casual, off the cuff speech. but we live in a country who’s wealth was jump started by the use of violence to steal land from people, and people from land.
what roblox, meta, and others are doing is harmful and unethical and worth talking about. it’s also not enslavement, and using that language only diminishes the real harm of actual enslavement by our country and the legacy we’re still dealing with
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Well. Their revenue for 2020 was $924 million, so although I’m sure they’re quite profitable (thanks to the Dickensian child labor), their profits are less than 1/65 of their alleged value.
I know it’s almost pointless to even mention at this stage, but that valuation is absurd. If my lemonade stand made $100 a year and you bought it from me for $6500, you would have to be a hardcore cretin, or up to some kind of scam, or (and we should not discount this possibility) very much both. In any case, it’s misleading to say I got rich “selling lemonade.”
Yes, Roblox is taking a ton of cash from children (which actually makes them unusually legit for a tech company), but that’s not what is making people rich here. If you bought a billion-dollar yacht with Roblox stocks, all the actual cash for that comes from Gulf-state sovereign wealth funds (et al) commanding the economy to pivot towards stealing from children.
It’s something to bear in mind when you hear politicians deferring to these guillotine-baits as the wise, deserving masters of the economy (i.e. world).
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But if you were making $100 from three kids running that stand and there were another 100 kids in the neighborhood to exploit then one might pay you $6500 for the footrprint. The value isn’t in the profit; worse, it’s in the potential profit.
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I seem to recall, maybe last year, my kid took me to maybe one of those third party, black market sites to buy digital crap for real money. I was so hesitant, but did end up putting in my credit card info. It was the first and last time, maybe because he sensed my extreme trepidation about the site in general. He also doesn’t hang out on roblox too much anymore. He’s all about steam, YT and his Switch.
As a small-time investor in Roblox now getting out after reading articles like this - I’m glad it’s at least big investors’ money that I’m taking. I’ll probably donate some of the profits to a charity like Common Sense Media to at least mitigate some of the harm.
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