Originally published at: Roblox an "x-rated pedophile hellscape" driven by "inflated metrics" - Boing Boing
…
12 Likes
Hey, roblox!
Sick!
8 Likes
Digital child slave labor for the new millennium. Roblox’s excuse is that the children enjoy playing with the cotton they pick.
11 Likes
Imagine starting a webservice from scratch, from crazy dream to real-world realization.
Imagine how affirming it is to see it being a massive success, popular in reach and worth billions.
Imagine finding out your product provides a safe haven for thousands of pedos and scum of the earth to prey on your underage naive user base.
Imagine having so much money that you don’t give a toss - as long as the valuation stays high the servers will stay on.
–
I know… describes pretty much any social media platform these days.
16 Likes
Our kid is intermittently interested in Roblox, as one friend or another mentions it. We have said no and this makes me believe we will continue to say no.
14 Likes
Isn’t “user generated content” Roblox’s whole deal?
Our 10 year old has mentioned it from time to time and it gets a firm No from me. He always asks me why and I just look at him and tell him, sorry kid your dad grew up during the rise of technology and computers. I’ve been around, I’ve seen a lot, and I’m not just letting him out into the wild yonder of the raw internet. Sometimes he asks, but why… That’s when I just pull out the parent card of “No, cause I said so.” I don’t like it, but the real answer is too dark and I think he needs to be a kid as long as he can.
11 Likes
“There are adults in the world who enjoy using children in illegal ways, and Roblox is one of the popular places they gather. And nobody is stopping them.”
Raise your kids as you do, and yes, “because I said so” is always in our back pockets, but a why tied to an age-appropriate reason is not a bad thing.
Innocence is fleeting, good on you for guarding it. I promise “because I said so” won’t suffice in a year or three.
15 Likes
It’s been balance between being truthful, age appropriate, and not sounding like we judge the parents of friends who do allow their kids to play on it. Our kid has never been good at handling “because we say so” 
We’ve explained it:
Roblox is a place where lots of kids hang out but that means bad people who want to do bad things to kids also go there. We don’t think the company does enough to keep the kids safe or keep the bad people off the servers.
It’s a a kind of game style we don’t think is healthy (spouse goes on at length about pay-to-play, micro transactions, sneaky tactics to convince kids to buy things and our kid eventually gets bored)
And also the tried and true, we’ve thought about it and looked into it and Roblox is not right for our family. You can play (insert appropriate game) instead.
I’d much rather pay for a bigger Minecraft realms their friends can log into. Cheaper than the Robux too.
20 Likes
I’m also fighting the Roblox encroachment with my kids. So far so good neither one has asked about it for a few weeks. I had a night where I sat with one of their friends while they were playing it and ooooffff am I glad we made the “no” call.
7 Likes
That company literally publishes research so that it can short sell stock of their targets. I know nothing about roblox but I wonder if that company does more than just research. If they cook the numbers some how by registering fake accounts etc.
2 Likes
A what?
I thought it was just a game. How the hell does this kind of thing even happen?
1 Like
because they allow users to talk to each other directly. because they have gifts - essentially - that users can give each other. because they do nothing when users report harm or abuse. and because their game is specifically targeted at children
they have created a place where kids congregate, and then provided adults with unimpeded access to those kids
i think roblox is unique. both because in game transactions are such a key part, and because of how little they do to moderate.
lots of games for kids don’t even allow direct chat because of all the problems that creates
15 Likes
If they’re just interested in the actual gameplay I think the solo/offline version is still available. That’s what we let our kids play when they were still into it.
ETA: actually, scratch that. Thinking back I’m pretty sure it was a different but thematically similar game I was thinking of.
2 Likes
The issue with pedophiles and CSAM has been reported multiple times over the last 5 years but the problem appears to be getting worse, instead of of better. Safety features are often opt-in instead of being opt-out. They only made some automatic for certain ages after a big blow out over a pedophile grooming children and exploiting their work for money on the platform. The program model is, at it’s base, particularly exploitative of creators and specifically geared to child creators. Hindenburg may be a short seller but I couldn’t find anything saying most of their research isn’t genuine. Their motives may be suspect, but nothing they turned up is any kind of surprise to anyone who knows about how Roblox operates
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-problem/
7 Likes
Unfortunately, it is the idea of playing with friends online that is attractive to our kid. We made a Minecraft realm for the 3 of them (and me) instead because I can control who is permitted.
13 Likes
Just a random side note: My dad used to sell wood chippers. The industrial kinds for arborists or city/county departments. The big ones could literally take a telephone pole and spit it out into chips.
3 Likes
Good idea. Minecraft is still a good one for that.
3 Likes
Yeah, in game design, trying to make user-generated content safe for even older audiences is a huge challenge, and that’s without a social media hellscape layer and exploitative market built in. Even if they were trying (and from reports, it doesn’t seem like they really are), it would be impossible, by design, to make this thing safe.
4 Likes
