[HN Gopher] Problems at Roblox
___________________________________________________________________
Problems at Roblox
Author : memorable
Score : 364 points
Date : 2022-07-07 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thebearcave.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thebearcave.substack.com)
| amatecha wrote:
| My thought: online games which children are playing, especially
| ~13 and younger, should NEVER have text chat typed on a keyboard.
| They should only allow symbolic communication like "emotes" and
| symbols, abstract and basic stuff. Moderation teams can not
| possibly ever keep up with the "arms race" of determined scammers
| and exploitative individuals. Just eliminate the entire class of
| problems upfront at the design stage. Save your company tons of
| money, too, both in staffing and in legal settlements.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| To Roblox's credit, they do take the "Club Penguin" approach:
| If you're under 13, you can only chat from a drop-down of chat
| options, and can only see messages sent using that
| functionality.
|
| Now, that doesn't stop kids from lying about their age when
| registering, but that's another can of worms.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| When do you let them grow up then? Or is it more about
| controlling your children than helping them?
| pokoleo wrote:
| I once interned at an easily google-able Secondlife competitor.
| They fought against NSFW content for a long time, but then
| figured out how to fix it by:
|
| 1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW
| content, and 2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who
| bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase)
|
| This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt
| with the NSFW content in one swoop.
| zkldi wrote:
| Sounds like it'd just incentivise people to make NSFW content
| on burners and then report it.
| happyopossum wrote:
| A) I don't think #2 would be A good idea for a kids game, and
| B) kids will absolutely start to game #1 with shill accounts
| and you may well wind up increasing the amount of 'evil stuff'
| as kids bring it to the platform for the sole purpose of
| reporting it to get Robux/swag.
| twawaaay wrote:
| My kids play Minecraft but they are not allowed to join servers
| with strangers. I set up some servers where they have freedom to
| do what they want but the only people they are allowed to play
| with are their friends from school and family.
| roca wrote:
| Welcome to the metaverse.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| There are two video investigations from People Make Games into
| economic aspects of Roblox in particular child labor/exploitation
| and monopolistic aspirations via platform capitalism.
|
| 1. Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
| ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ )
|
| 2. Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY )
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Letting your child talk to strangers on the internet may not be
| the best idea. News at 11.
|
| No moderation system is flawless. If you are going to let your
| kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like
| avoiding sexualized content.
|
| I do find the digging in to the personal lives of the employees
| here pretty bad taste. Yes an adult can look at porn and have
| sexual relationships with other adults, whether they work at
| Roblox or Toys R Us.
| conductr wrote:
| > If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the
| internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content.
|
| Problem with this is kids are sneaky, curious and liars.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Maybe be straight up with them instead of "shielding" them so
| they're not curious anymore. As a European I find American
| culture extremely prude. And anything that's "forbidden" is
| automatically interesting. For some reason I genuinely don't
| understand however, most people prefer ignoring these kinds
| of factors of human nature and just keep forcing their values
| and norms when it's clearly not working.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| It's so absurd. They call their children sneaky liars in
| the Anglo-sphere and then never tell them the truth in a
| silly attempt to "protect" their innocence. Of course they
| are sneaky liars?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| There are two ways to teach a kid to not run into the street
| - you can yell at them every time they do or you can explain
| why streets are dangerous.
|
| This applies to most things.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Streets are not exactly intelligent adults who are lusting
| after your children... Streets are not good to run into.
| Easy. This person who is nice to you online and has been
| your friend for the last three weeks might be fine or might
| slowly be grooming you. Hard.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Yeah the human element obviously is harder than a static
| foe, which is why we teach a mixture of guides (soft
| rules) and hard rules. Something like:
|
| Hard rule: never send photos of yourself to someone
| online, without letting one of us do it for you.
|
| Guide: Don't trust any adults or other kids who ask you
| about your underwear
|
| Rule: Don't tell anyone where you live or give them your
| address or where you go to school
|
| Guide: If you feel uncomfortable talking to someone, stop
| talking to them and get one of your parents.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Most kids need both of those at various times, because
| they're kids.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| No. Only a child-acting parent yells at their children.
| It might be popular in your culture, but it doesn't make
| it right.
| roca wrote:
| Explain away to a five-year-old but it's not enough. You
| will also need to practice safe behaviors and sometimes
| yell.
| donkarma wrote:
| Roblox is extremely predatory outside of child grooming scenarios
| as well due to the fact that every game includes dark patterns in
| order to get them to spend money in order to progress because
| they won't get moderated. I imagine it would cause addictive
| behaviour.
| zac23or wrote:
| Wow, Roblox has text/voice chat! I've worked on a comment system
| before, it's basically impossible to block bad behavior using
| filters, AI, whatever, users find a loophole and continue with
| the behavior. Mods are super needed. Text/voice chat + real
| money. It's a pedophile's paradise.
| alexk307 wrote:
| Shocked to hear the responses on here. This is disgusting,
| regardless of the blogs writing style or your opinion on furry
| porn, some of the allegations are pretty gross. If your platform
| aims to attract children as their primary user base, this crap
| should not be happening as often as it does on their platform.
| ajb wrote:
| So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant
| corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking
| to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough
| incentive to put in the effort.
|
| I wonder if there is an opportunity here to get a fully
| distributed effort going, based on web of trust.
|
| Most users don't do web of trust verification even in apps which
| support it, like signal, because it's not worth the effort for
| general low stakes communication. But people are willing to put
| in a _lot_ of effort to keep their kids safe. And the requirement
| here: "I want my kids only to message adults I trust, or kids
| that an adult I trust has verified _are_ kids " is a good match
| for web of trust, because it's basically an emulation of how the
| mark 1 meatspace method of doing it worked. (yes, my use case
| here is for younger kids, older ones should be able to explore
| more and I haven't figured out how that would work).
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| If Web of trust is just your real life friends (the parent
| controls who that list is) then yes.
|
| Beyond that there is no trust.
| larrik wrote:
| > So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant
| corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are
| talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have
| enough incentive to put in the effort.
|
| As a parent dealing with some of this currently, this isn't
| entirely how I'd put it.
|
| Roblox is marketed for kids, and claims to have a large number
| of parental controls, but in fact they either don't work or
| don't exist. Most parents aren't savvy enough to know they even
| need to check for that.
|
| Meanwhile, I'm extremely computer literate (a developer even),
| and have largely banned my kids from the internet, installed
| multiple blockers and monitors, _and my kid still gets to shady
| places and content._ It 's f-ing impossible unless you are
| going to literally watch over their shoulder the whole time,
| which is wildly unrealistic and frankly immoral once they reach
| a certain age.
|
| It's exasperating.
| operator-name wrote:
| The curiosity for the forbidden/unknown is a powerful
| motivator for children. Destroying that magic by personally
| becoming invested can be quite effective.
|
| The same applies for things that are "cool" or whatever the
| current term is. Either you become part of the "in group" and
| earn some of your child's respect or whatever you touch no
| longer becomes corrupted by your "boomer energy". Both are a
| win and far more effective than the cat and mouse game of
| training them to be mini pen-testers.
| [deleted]
| warent wrote:
| As for the weird rapey song, it actually originates from a
| youtube channel that makes comedy videos.
|
| It's based on a creepy/horror game called Baldi's Basics:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlouAA8mRZo Obviously very NSFW
|
| In context, the song is just adult humor. But, yeah, definitely
| does not belong in a children's game.
| nights192 wrote:
| I admit I find the ferverent vociferations against ROBLOX as an
| entity somewhat disheartening; the game was cynosure to my
| childhood, providing precious experience to me in learning how to
| navigate social situations and cope with the rammifications
| thereof.
|
| Pedophiles did, and do, exist, but this is a fact of life in any
| manner of social media or large community; discussing frankly how
| malevolent some may be is imperative, even if it does not preempt
| all danger posed. The alternative, stifling all manners of
| creative expression available to those who may otherwise be
| socially shunted, is untenable to me, as it does not line up with
| what my experience growing up using this technology taught me.
|
| Nothing in life is without risk--exposure to this risk over a
| platform that's online, somewhat discoverable, and insulated is
| vastly preferable to keeping your kids blissful and unknowing of
| what would threaten them. Please do not attempt to parent in such
| a way that motivates your children to hide things from you and
| cut you out of the loop entirely.
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| Roblox must die, the monster that eats children.
| duxup wrote:
| There's a lot of "so and so did bad things" and "Roblox
| terminated his account".
|
| Maybe they should be faster but I wonder if ultimately the
| solution that some folks would want is just no communication for
| kids apps ... I've got mixed feelings about that.
| adamrezich wrote:
| who could've foreseen that a microtransaction-based multiplayer
| user-generated content platform designed for children (with the
| ability to cash out in-game currency to real money(?!)) could've
| led to these sorts of problems
| Jtothe5 wrote:
| Old news people. This pops up every time the short sellers are on
| the prowl.
| mrits wrote:
| The internet, social media, boy scouts, relatives, and everything
| else has these problems. It is why kids need parents.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yes indeed, but at least some of the acts described in the blog
| post would land "normal", non-stock-listed forum operators in
| front of a court: aiding gambling activity and child abuse are
| serious crimes.
|
| There are numerous laws that detail the responsibilities of
| operating anything on the Internet that is targeted towards
| children, and Roblox seems to be completely ignoring these. Not
| to mention they are ignoring their _moral_ responsibility of
| protecting their underage users.
|
| Roblox needs to shut down Robux redeeming immediately and
| prevent any kind of interaction where one account has not been
| verified to be of age and accounts that have been verified, and
| maybe allow interactions between close age groups. It's not
| _that_ hard to do so.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Robux redeeming is how the people actually developing content
| for Roblox get paid.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yeah part of the issue is that with the boy scouts or relatives
| you have a bit more ability to watch your kids or can hope
| someone else is there to watch them.
|
| It's a lot easier for a child to be unsupervised on the
| internet. I know I could do a lot of what I wanted online
| growing up even thought my in person interactions were pretty
| limited.
|
| Part of that was my parents unawareness about the internet but
| even if they were smarter about it I would have found ways to
| get around anything they put in place.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| There are some specific structures and incentives that create
| situations that make it easy to groom children. We can work to
| correct those.
|
| For example Scouts relies (desperately) on volunteers. So
| unfortunately the "trusted adult" is perhaps sometime TOO
| interested in volunteering. And the Scout group sadly doesn't
| think deeply enough cause they're just happy to have a parent
| volunteer. You can see how this can create a dynamic that
| attracts the wrong kind of person that want to groom families
| to prey on children.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Pretty much all hierarchies run into this kind of perverse
| self-selection bias. Power hungry individuals are more
| motivated to climb the rungs of politics than anyone else.
| The work involved aquiring the kinds of fortunes that make
| you able to effect change weeds out anybody who doesn't just
| care about money. Popularity based positions get dominated by
| narcissists.
|
| Bad actors are just more dedicated than the good ones. It's a
| hard situation to fix barring the complete elimination of
| privileged positions.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Cerium wrote:
| Are you suggesting that the situation has materially changed in
| the last five months? Perhaps you have some detail to share?
| [deleted]
| 14 wrote:
| My young son started telling me about his friend from Florida
| that he started talking to. I am from Canada and across the
| country so questioned if the person he was talking to was a real
| child or some pedophile. Thankfully he video called her soon
| after and it was another 10year old girl and they just liked to
| play online but it definitely worries and and I'm not sure how
| Roblox can tackle the issue.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Get them a nintendo switch or Steam Deck.
|
| Roblox teaches kids about being exploited by scrip.
| roca wrote:
| It won't be long before paedophiles can produce video avatars
| of themselves as children. In fact they might already be able
| to do that.
| rtev wrote:
| It's already possible to do this in real-time
| phren0logy wrote:
| Some of this blog post is over-reaching, which is a shame because
| the clear and significant problems need absolutely no
| embellishment.
| [deleted]
| bri3d wrote:
| This - definitely, any platform with a userbase that's
| substantially comprised of children and which offers free
| communication is going to be a complete disaster requiring
| ridiculous amounts of moderation and careful parental
| involvement.
|
| It is clear that Roblox have failed to deliver the moderation
| capabilities necessary to market their platform as "safe," and
| are more interested in making money.
|
| But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on
| Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened
| to be from a problematic account, are totally random and
| unfounded - what's that got to do with anything?
|
| And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted
| from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and
| more investigation, or none at all.
|
| This essay, and this substack in general, really lack focus -
| they publish dramatic exposes which are just a hodgepodge of
| random "dirt" thrown together, some interesting and serious and
| mostly nothing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation
| distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a
| second post and more investigation, or none at all.
|
| Half-baked? It's enough if casino sites _exist_ for a serious
| violation of gambling and AML /KYC laws.
| bri3d wrote:
| This is skin gambling, where in-game items are wagered by
| proxy, so the actual structure of the gambling is
| unfortunately somewhat nuanced.
|
| I agree that it's unethical and Roblox failing to crack
| down on these sites by any means they can, again,
| represents a failing.
|
| But I'd have liked to see a separate post with a deeper
| investigation into how the gambling sites are structured,
| and how the cash-out economy works.
|
| Proxy-gambling using skins and secondary markets has been
| highly controversial since at least the CS:GO days and
| unfortunately it _isn't_ that clear that there's a serious
| violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws on the part of
| Roblox. Valve have been somewhat successful so far in
| defending themselves against the Washington gaming
| commission and many lawsuits surrounding CS:GO skin
| gambling.
|
| But, Roblox have a direct cash-out program for in-game
| content developers which may change their situation.
|
| I'd again, have loved to seen this investigated more in
| another blog post. This one was weirdly unfocused to me
| because it started with serious, well-founded allegations
| of inadequate moderation leading to harm to children, in
| contrast to "safe" marketing. Then it progressed to a
| random aside accusing a safety officer of being a furry
| (???). And then flipped to another aside about finding a
| gambling site.
| philistine wrote:
| Watch the people make games videos about Roblox. That
| will answer all your questions about it's operations.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows
| on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that
| happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random
| and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything?
|
| It's one thing to watch/engage with this stuff privately in
| your personal life. It's quite another thing to have:
|
| >> Roblox's former social media manager ran a public
| pornographic blog with "furry porn" and photos of himself
|
| And
|
| >> Roblox's official verified Twitter account retweeted
| content from "DukeButDuke" with #FanArtFriday.
|
| This is _not_
|
| > jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows
|
| This is Roblox's public representatives at a high level in
| the company publicly promoting this stuff. Put another way,
| if you posted a blog article about furry porn and pictures of
| yourself nude, then prominently displayed it next to your
| public work profile, do you honestly think that your company
| would have no right to fire you? There's a reason lots of
| bloggers that work for big companies will put "this blog and
| these ideas have no affiliation with company X" disclaimers
| everywhere, and that's just for semi controversial blogging
| topics.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Whilst the issues raised are serious and I don't want to detract
| from the severity of the allegations, but I really take issue
| with putting regular porn and furry porn in the same league as
| pedophilia.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| It's genuinely distressing to me how the author has shoehorned
| in a suppsosed link between fictional fantasies published
| between adults on Twitter and actual child sex abuse and
| grooming. The fact the author chose to include these, as well
| as the dictionary rendition of 'loli complex' without delving
| any deeper into the reasons this subculture exists between
| adults shows a shocking lack of due diligence.
|
| The fact that somebody likes gay furry porn and posts nude
| pictures of themselves _in adult spaces_ has nothing to do with
| child sex abuse.
|
| On the other hand, it isn't all that surprising; crusaders
| against porn and deviance frequently tie in far larger and more
| serious issues, but this author has done the opposite: take
| very serious issues of CSA and in order to inflame the reader's
| sensibilities feels he must mention that 'deviant' content.
| cybrox wrote:
| The article is not about pedophilia or child porn
| specifically but about all the different "Issues at Roblox"
|
| I'd say it's not exactly ideal for a company aimed at kids to
| have their public figures, supposed people of trust, sharing
| porn of themselves openly.
|
| I don't have an issue with porn but I can see how this is an
| issue for the company and its reputation.
| bil7 wrote:
| i think the author conflated "is openly sexual online" and
| "works on a game targeted at children". As you say, strong
| evidence in the article, cloudy delivery.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It shows a trend of deviant behavior that coincides
| suspiciously with their work: building and marketing an online
| space designed to attract children.
|
| You can take issue with it if you want, but the fact is that
| there is real world overlap.
| int_19h wrote:
| "Deviant" is a label that has been thrown at gay people for
| ages; why are we still using it?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have much sympathy for this view point.
|
| However I think the main issue is that said person was using a
| "professional" twitter handle to engage in this sort of stuff.
| Sadly I suspect that the furry porn bit was added to make them
| seem more deviant. When it should be more a case of
| inappropriate.
| gamache wrote:
| When your company's product is targeted at children, it is
| definitely weird when your social media director and your head
| of trust and safety both include porn in their public online
| persona.
|
| Nothing wrong with porn, but it's relevant to this article.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I wouldn't let children on twitter, and as a child, I really
| couldn't have cared less about Lego's marketing officers
| twitter follow list. Is the expectation here that any public
| facing representative of a company that mainly targets
| children must lead a pegi 3 life? I don't particularly enjoy
| defending corporate entities here, but unless their twitter
| handle was supposed to be used in official capacity for
| Roblox, who should give a shit?
|
| And again, unless the person in question shared smut with
| children, how would this be relevant to pedophilia? I am also
| not arguing that this is the wisest move on the part of the
| exec in question, it looks stupid, but there should be
| nothing indictable about this.
|
| Ultimately, this is an article about exposing how a
| corporation through negligence at best and malicious intent
| is empowering child abusers to abuse children, why go the
| Jess extra effort and try and make these people look worse by
| pointing out that these people like porn?
| kmacdough wrote:
| I agree that this article does seem to lump some behaviors
| together of wildly different severity. But when the job is
| managing and monitoring the safety of children in a massive
| online space, it seems reasonable, nay necessary, to judge
| them by a high standard. It doesn't have to be a crime, or
| even inherently bad, to be a red flag.
|
| In this case, I find it very strange that the head of
| Roblox's Trust & Safety department didn't think twice about
| following indecent accounts on public social media account.
| Even stranger still, that a company who pretends to value
| the safety of children either didn't bother with a basic
| background check, or saw it and went "yeah, this guy's got
| good judgement."
|
| I've got nothing against people publicly
| endorsing/following these things, but I'd expect this dude
| to have enough discretion to recognize that many parents
| would object, and keep it on a private account like a
| normal person.
|
| Heads of PR for major companies have been fired for a heck
| of a lot less.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > there should be nothing indictable about this.
|
| it isn't indictable, but people are free to have a much
| higher bar than the legal system sets for what they
| consider acceptable standards to interact with their
| children.
|
| you're free to post all the porn you like on your public
| social media profiles. parents are free to not really want
| you to be around their children.
|
| the fact that you are legally free to do all kinds of
| things in this country doesn't mean that you can do them
| without any social repercussions.
|
| the freedom of speech isn't freedom from criticism, and
| from other people's negative social reactions, it just says
| that the government won't throw you in jail for it.
| concordDance wrote:
| "Freedom of speech" has multiple meanings. One is a
| question of law (e.g. the gov won't arrest you) the other
| is a statement of guiding principle (e.g. that it is good
| for people to feel able to express themselves).
|
| The scope and worth of that principle can and should be
| debated, but it shouldn't be ignored. E.g. shunning
| anyone who expressed the opinion that maybe homosexuality
| shouldn't be banned would have been bad for social
| change.
| nr2x wrote:
| It shows incredibly poor judgment on the part of the company
| that they'd put anybody who shares porn online in charge of
| children.
|
| Lots of people consume porn, very few see fit to share it on
| social media.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Anyone is fine to share porn online.
|
| Just make a spare account and have some shame about it.
| When it's part of your public persona is when it's a
| problem.
|
| Unless it's literally of you, then things get a lot more
| complicated.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Why is it so horrible for a public persona to acknowledge
| a part of their life that isn't all that extraordinary?
| bioemerl wrote:
| Horrible is the wrong word. It's like meeting someone and
| they stink.
|
| In my experience the people who consistently fail to draw
| these lines also tend to end up being some sort of toxic
| to you and or your friend group and or your company.
|
| Invite a friend who stinks because they don't shower?
| You're going to lose friends over it who don't want to be
| around it. Invite a friend who publicly displays porn?
| Same deal.
| concordDance wrote:
| "Weird"? So? It might be weird if the head of social media
| was an orthodox jew, it would also be unworthy of note.
| acoard wrote:
| It absolutely is worthy of note.
|
| I have nothing wrong with people selling porn, but it's not
| remotely kid appropriate. Society expects a large berth
| between the two. If a kids company hired a porn-star to
| sell their products that would be weird, even if they
| didn't mention porn while on the clock. Similarly it would
| be weird if Roblox was also a joint venture with PornHub.
| This wouldn't hold if they were just Orthodox Jews.
| stickfigure wrote:
| FWIW, I'd also flag extreme religious beliefs as "worthy
| of note":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Us_(2017_film)
| kentm wrote:
| I'm taking the claim of "sharing porn on social media" at
| face value.
|
| I have nothing against producing, sharing, and consuming
| pornography but its typically done in private. A social
| media persona is public. It is inappropriate to share
| pornography in public. When that public persona is attached
| to a place of responsibility, then doing so is showing poor
| judgement. It's not at all comparable to being an orthodox
| jew.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| The fine article also calls out tweeting about Ponies: The
| Galloping, an official Magic: The Gathering product featuring
| characters from My Little Pony, as the sort of thing one would
| only do if they were a danger to society.
| [deleted]
| pizzathyme wrote:
| If the regular porn and furry porn are being shared with
| children, it is very serious
| eptcyka wrote:
| I agree, but then the issue is child abuse and should be
| clearly stated as such. Making vague remarks about someone's
| personal twitter account isn't that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's one thing if some random employee doesn't take care
| about a social media account that can trivially be
| associated with their company. But high-ranked executives,
| particularly in sensitive departments?! JFC it's not that
| hard to create an anonymous account on any social media
| site except Facebook.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| But they aren't and the article doesn't suggest they are.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Expect both to be banned or at least the idea brought up the
| next time Republicans are in power.
|
| Edit: you can downvote me all you want but all you have to do
| is look at MTG's Twitter profile to see what I'm talking about.
| For instance: https://www.protocol.com/amp/mtg-
| sec-230-2657233040
| dfxm12 wrote:
| skybrian wrote:
| I think that's true in some states, but not others.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Is banning porn better or worse than banning discussion of
| vaccines and their problems?
|
| How about this: "free speech" applies, equally, to posting
| furry porn and objecting to it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| People downvote you like this sort of thing wasn't actively
| being discussed by conservatives even before RvW fell.
| Restricting sexual liberty is part and parcel of the
| republican platform.
| Clent wrote:
| Agreed. Including those killed the tone of the article. It
| reads like a hit piece.
| dqpb wrote:
| > It reads like a hit piece
|
| There's nothing wrong with a hit piece if it's factual
| imglorp wrote:
| Is no one talking about the valuation? OP says $38B, looks like
| about $20B today down from $60B in December [1].
|
| Is this all potential upside from their token and service fees,
| or what?
|
| 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RBLX/key-statistics
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Disney Toontown solved this problem 20 years ago. You give people
| a pre-populated list of things they can say, and that's it.
| There's literally no other way to protect kids on these services.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| And hows Toontown doing now? There is a reason Roblox enables
| chat. It increases their engagement.
| midwestemo wrote:
| I played Roblox in the past (like 2012?) and it did have one
| called Safe Chat. It got removed in 2014 according to here.
|
| https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/In-experience_chat#Filtering
| bioemerl wrote:
| The wiki says it was replaced by a tool that kicks on for
| everyone under 13 that only lets them use words from a very
| specific whitelist.
|
| If they don't do this already they need to divide the player
| bases. Want to play in the <13 rooms? You have to use the
| same word whitelist they have.
| Delphiza wrote:
| Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of
| the Internet, except that it _appears_ child-friendly to parents.
| It _seems_ to have controls, and _seems_ to restrict bad
| behaviour, but it does not, and cannot. My daughter was roped
| into an online paedophile ring when she was 12. The initial
| contacts and grooming were made through Roblox... almost right
| under our noses. Every time we, as parents, looked at what she
| was doing, it _seemed_ okay. We could have dug deeper, but did
| not. Luckily we caught it before it progressed too far, but some
| damage was done.
|
| Wherever you can, tell parents to flat-out block Roblox.
|
| Edit: Because people are asking how it works.
|
| Roblox is a lot about bragging rights for individuals. You gain
| skins, trade for rare items, buy Robux for real money that can be
| used to buy items. Players flock around those that that have rare
| or expensive items. My daughter had a "super super happy face". I
| just googled, and it is current selling for $350. It makes them
| feel wanted and important. So just like fornite and skins in
| other games.
|
| The groomers feed the celebrity, sense of community and so on to
| engage in chat. It starts as in-game chat, which you can never
| see the history of, before moving to DMs. The chat has tricks to
| get around removed words, so they all communicate in some sort of
| code that they all pick up along the way. Then they are able to
| divert them to other platforms where there are fewer controls. My
| daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one.
| Then they follow up on other platform calls (or phone calls) and
| follow the usual grooming techniques.
|
| The trick is to identify the marks by how they behave in the
| game, and in the more popular, and social ones, I think that it
| is quite easy (in retrospect).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pizzathyme wrote:
| It sounds like they are completely failing to scale their
| moderation teams with their platform. This is extremely
| dangerous and causes real harm. They need funded ML engineers,
| human reviewers, policy experts, product engineers, data
| scientists, and the will to protect people. Like any massive
| social network this is a moral imperative.
|
| I don't know what the current state is of their roadmap but I
| hope for everyone's sake that they get their act together
| quickly.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Honestly I don't think there's a single mega-platform which
| _hasn't_ failed to scale their moderation team.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Nintendo
| mike00632 wrote:
| Actually, TikTok seems to do a good job. They understand
| they have a lot of children on the app and they take that
| very seriously as a responsibility. Unfortunately their
| solution is over-the-top censorship but it works better
| than other platforms from what I've seen. They used to have
| a "no politics" policy where TikTok simply wasn't a place
| for politics. They scale moderation by simply over-
| moderating and that is in line with their offering of a
| curated feed as opposed to a "platform" for arbitrary
| content delivery.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| hahahahaha
| crummy wrote:
| There's still plenty of people unhappy with it:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/technology/tiktok-
| blackou...
| amalter wrote:
| No politics? My fyp highly disagrees. However, the
| algorithm is amazingly good at keeping you in your
| political in-group.
|
| You'll often hear content creators talk about "getting on
| the wrong side of TikTok" - meaning they started getting
| recommended to an out-group. (For example super cool
| super funny @melissadilkoateras ending up in MAGA feeds
| occasionally).
|
| Cue brigading of reports, community violations, etc until
| the audience stabilizes.
|
| I think the reputation is due to the zealous take down
| policy and the solid profiling that keeps you in your
| comfortable content window.
| treis wrote:
| There's also probably not a single mega-platform that cares
| even a little bit about abuse. At least not to the extent
| of paying any growth or revenue cost to prevent abuse.
| RGamma wrote:
| It's the age old tale of society paying the cost because
| it _has to_.
| failuser wrote:
| That's a feature, not a bug. Not having moderation and proper
| customer service when you have scale saves you a lot of
| money. When all you friends play Roblox you don't have good
| options.
| peppertree wrote:
| When you have a known hangout place for children, anonymous
| chat, and a corporation with the financial means to suppress
| bad press. It's just a recipe for abuse.
| quornxypt wrote:
| Can you give more info on this so I know what to look out for?
| peppertree wrote:
| Speaking as a parent, I try not to snoop on my children's
| conversions. If they find out you are snooping they will get
| very creative at hiding it. The most important thing is to
| know who they are interacting with and get to know their
| parents.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think this depends on your children's age. If your kids
| are reasonable 15+, then sure. You shouldn't be spying on
| them. If your kids are 12? Then you probably should be.
|
| This is less about spying or snooping and more about
| knowing children aren't mature enough to have private
| conversations with strangers.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Meanwhile I was doing full RP at 13.
|
| I think people forget how mature children actually are.
| defen wrote:
| Thought experiment: Do you think current-you could
| manipulate 13-year-old-you into doing something bad? If
| the answer is no, then that means you were mentally fully
| developed by age 13. To which I say congratulations, but
| that is definitely not typical. If the answer is yes,
| then you should understand the concerns that parents
| have.
| leaflets2 wrote:
| What's RP?
|
| I think children develop vastly differently from each
| other, maybe some others wouldn't have been doing "RP"
| until they were 17?
|
| What if you were early?
|
| I remember when I was 14-15 I wanted to play games and
| "hide and seek", whilst some of my friends had started
| enjoying sitting down and just _talking_ , how boring.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| "hide and seek" at 15 - that's highly unusual
| jstarfish wrote:
| So are Nerf guns at the office.
|
| We still played hide-and-seek at that age, but we would
| rebrand/reframe it in terms of a wargame with a name like
| "manhunt." This was decades ago though.
|
| I haven't seen kids playing outside in about as long.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think most of the time unsupervised children will be
| fine online. Sometimes they will get hurt, and perhaps
| very seriously hurt, by being unsupervised online.
|
| Supervising your kid online is like putting them in a car
| seat even though you're unlikely to get in a crash. It's
| appropriate when they're young and becomes inappropriate
| as they get older.
| sokoloff wrote:
| At 12 or 13, I was being dropped off at the basement
| apartment of some creepy old dude who ran an Atari BBS
| and held open houses for the most engaged members.
|
| From everything I saw/noticed, it was 100.0% on the up
| and up, but as a parent of kids that age now, the thought
| horrifies me.
| moomin wrote:
| My kid plays Roblox. I disabled chat on it years ago (I spotted
| something and was 100% not having it.). She's still asking for
| it to be re-enabled and I'm still "thinking about it".
| grog454 wrote:
| Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try
| educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
|
| These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system
| involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are
| less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit
| trust, for example schools.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| I have an eight year old and no matter how many times I
| explain the concept of sarcasm he just can't get it. Even
| seconds after explaining the concept, I test him with an
| absurd statement and he takes it literally. I have made
| repeated attempts to teach him and he just doesn't get it.
| Their brains are still developing
| supernovae wrote:
| I love my kids, but at the roblox age, kids are assholes.
| Self Centered. Egotistical assholes. Their brains don't
| know any better and while you can teach them everything you
| could hope they learn, they have this chemical in their
| body that basically says "my parents are idiots and I know
| better" and they're going to make mistakes and do stupid
| things. The amount of unfettered mistakes and stupidity one
| can do on the internet is boundless. I didn't grow up with
| such boundless access to the world.
|
| These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we
| _used_ to know it. Kids used to draw something that their
| parents would hang on the fridge and they didn 't make 350
| bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my
| fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with
| 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds
| were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it
| was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit
| in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
|
| At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox
| groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute
| the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long
| kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to
| create and they had to work.. and they stopped being
| kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these
| communities to profit off child labor.
|
| But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the
| roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat -
| then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things
| infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter,
| instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
|
| THat desire for instant gratification and community at all
| costs then has them looking for other people in similar
| situations and that usually means self diagnosing things,
| searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in
| really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep
| up. Not even them.
|
| So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't
| equipped to handle it either.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Not the original parent, but because you are tasking a
| literal child to have the ability to be able to understand
| extreme social nuance with an already limited understanding
| of social situations. Children should be made aware of some
| of these dangers, but overall, most children won't have the
| psychological or social tools to be able to properly handle
| these issues, especially when the in-universe rewards are
| so massive (fame and popularity in Robolox is something
| children really crave, a sense of belonging is pretty core
| to human psychology). From my perspective, it's all around
| healthier to disengage in the platforms that enable such
| toxic behaviors to take place, especially when the platform
| creators are fiscally incentivized to turn a blind eye.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You should definitely educate, but pick your battles. If
| Roblox is that infested with predators, and they are gonna
| be sophisticated, then maybe it is easier to avoid.
|
| Even as an adult how many of us get scammed. Even cops do!
| [deleted]
| GiorgioG wrote:
| > Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not
| try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot
| them?
|
| Because predators are older and smarter than your average
| naive kid. A few years ago I'm making breakfast for my wife
| (I work from home) and the doorbell rings - it's two town
| cops asking if I'm the parent of <my kid's name>. Turns
| out, some local pedophile had sent some dick pics to my 12
| year old kid several months prior on Snapchat and they
| wanted to interview her. This was the first we'd heard of
| what had happened. We'd long since removed her from social
| media (unrelated to this event). And this was after
| spending countless hours repeating ourselves to death about
| not talking to strangers online. And yes we checked her
| phone daily...But Snapchat being what it is (disappearing
| messages), makes it more difficult to audit. She even told
| this guy what neighborhood we lived in. Since this was his
| first offense, the guy got 6 months probation and a
| permanent restraining order against him. Nothing ever came
| of it, and she's a few years older (and hopefully wiser)
| ... and the social media restrictions are still on.
|
| In hindsight I wouldn't give my kid a phone until they were
| > 15 years old and even then it would depend on their
| maturity level.
| thalassophobia wrote:
| Do you think having their social media checked by a
| parent might negatively affect how their peers view and
| treat your child?
| leshenka wrote:
| Quite a dilemma, huh?
|
| It's either allowing dangers of internet or allowing some
| peer pressure because your kid is "loser who not only is
| not on snapgram but doesn't even have a phone and they're
| in a second grade already"
| [deleted]
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's horrible, I'm sorry that your daughter and your family
| had to experience this :(
| nr2x wrote:
| So sorry this happened to you, very troubling as a parent.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a
| porn one.
|
| I'm missing a step, here....and I suspect a few others are as
| well.
| macspoofing wrote:
| I guess the only way to 'fix' this kind of stuff is to go down
| the Nintendo route of highly restricted multiplayer interaction
| (friend-codes, no chat, etc.). And they probably will have to
| do that. Once the media and especially regulators get them in
| their sights (as COPPA violation in the US), Roblox will play
| ball real quick.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Are you able to go into more detail? I avoided roblox for my
| daughter as long as I could, but her cousins stopped playing
| minecraft with her, going exclusively to roblox. The inertia
| was eventually too much. I've limited her to a couple
| experiences and to only talk to her cousins, but I don't really
| see much control otherwise.
| csin wrote:
| May I ask. As someone without children. Why not just educate
| your daughter on the topic of pedophiles? With that
| awareness, she can play whatever she wants.
| xeromal wrote:
| Grown adults get catfished regularly. It's hard to expect a
| 12 year to fend for themselves for the more sly tricks.
| nemothekid wrote:
| To add on to what others say, not only are children naive,
| but you have consider pedophiles as adversaries not unlike
| you would consider a skilled hacker. Just like a hacker may
| set up an entire company page and prepare a series a mock
| interviews just to get a senior engineer to open a
| malicious PDF; so will pedophiles who target children
| online. They don't wear an "I'm a pedophile badge", it
| starts with a slow build of confidence and trust that
| someone without experience will be vulnerable to.
| pavlov wrote:
| This. The network of lies may be intricate. The child may
| believe to be interacting with someone their age that
| they come to consider their best friend.
|
| Think of the elaborate long-term deception that can be
| involved in regular heterosexual marriages. Some people
| have multiple families that don't know about each other!
| Now consider what it can be like if that same dark energy
| is applied to lying to a child online.
| FrancoisBosun wrote:
| Trust (2011) is a movie that shows us how the pedophile
| works. Trust is a movie about a 14 year old girl that falls
| prey to a man, and the process by which he got what he
| wanted.
|
| I highly recommend the movie.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1529572/
| Delphiza wrote:
| I our case, they didn't present as pedophiles (obviously).
| It was a kid that was the same age (obviously not). She
| believed that he was another kid with older siblings, that
| lived wherever, and was bullied at school. How does that
| seem like a pedophile? At some point he started threatening
| that he had a bigger brother that knew where she lived, but
| the nice kid would protect her... or something. Turned out
| that they were a ring operating out of Indonesia that
| would, at the right time hand over to locals.
|
| You can't educate kids to identify pedo's. Online and in
| Roblox they are exectly the same as them. With siblings,
| parents that stop them from doing stuff, and so on. There
| is nothing remarkable about them to educate kids or
| yourself about.
| hluska wrote:
| My ex and I just talked about this and for the record, we
| both like how you think. We have a six year old together
| and she has two older children from a previous
| relationship.
|
| We are going to:
|
| a.) Educate her on the general concept of pedophiles.
|
| b.) Arm her with specific tactics about specific
| communities.
|
| c.) Monitor.
|
| d.) Get her permission to constantly log into her accounts
| and play as her.
|
| I pray this is enough. :(
| iecheruo wrote:
| Education helps a great deal but there is a reason 12 year
| olds don't hold office or run fortune 500 companies.
|
| In aggregate the judgement and maturity required to protect
| themselves from being exploited has not quite fully
| developed.
|
| It's why there are so many social and legal protections for
| children, they are just inherently vulnerable.
| giomasce wrote:
| In addition to what has already bern written, notice that
| children and teenagers often need to test limits to define
| their own identity and independency. So there are good
| chances that prohibiting something is going to make it even
| more appalling to them.
|
| This is not bad on itself, I think it's a fundamental step
| of becoming young adults. And it doesn't mean parents can
| never trust children. But neither can they assume that what
| was discussed can be always given for granted.
| pfortuny wrote:
| They are children. By definition, they lack self-awareness,
| self-control and the ability to perceive risk and danger.
|
| Talking is good but not enough at all.
| freedom-fries wrote:
| Fair question and I had too when I didn't have my own. The
| best way I can explain is - Think how stupid and
| emotionally strong is the average adult, now scale by a
| factor of what you think a person who has a fraction of
| experience and emotional strength.
|
| It becomes scarier once you factor in that kids' learning
| is not linear, and a 12-13 old kid is simultaneously
| dealing with hormonal changes as well and you have a
| situation that most parents can barely deal with!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Think how stupid and emotionally strong is the average
| adult, now scale by a factor of what you think a person
| who has a fraction of experience and emotional strength._
|
| Counterpoint: the very phenomenon you mention could be a
| consequence of overprotective parenting.
|
| By the age of 12, it's time to start explaining some
| uncomfortable things to your kids. _Especially_ if you
| 're going to let them interact with strangers (of any
| age) online.
| tclancy wrote:
| Not every kid is your kid, not every family is in your
| situation.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Likewise, I'm sure.
| bombcar wrote:
| One thing I'd do is _play as her character_ at times - the
| cousins should know you do it, and she should (hopefully) be
| fine with you grinding whatever it is Roblox 's have.
| Anything untoward should also occur to you whilst playing.
|
| And be completely open and upfront about the dangers, and how
| the "scams" work.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think this is likely the best way to go about it, but
| offer some sort of reward for their transparency such as
| helping them achieve in-game goals, and maybe rewarding
| them for out of game accomplishments (good grades, cleaning
| dishes, putting away clothes, etc) with in-game rewards you
| normally pay for. At least then it's not some creepy old
| man asking for inappropriate things in exchange for a in-
| game reward.
|
| Also make it clear, that you're worried about other players
| doing bad things to her that she might not realize is
| insanely bad.
|
| When I first would use the internet, my mom freaked out one
| of my friends typed a little too fast, I don't know if my
| mom was right or wrong, I don't know how much faster I
| would of typed at the same age had I had a computer for a
| few years more, but she was like nope. Block them. So I
| did.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| What was the concern about typing too fast? That the mom
| couldn't monitor what they're typing because they were
| submitting before she could finish reading?
| spoonjim wrote:
| No I think that it's a clear sign of an adult. You don't
| see many 12-year-olds who can type at the speed that I
| can type at, although you do see some.
| koprulusector wrote:
| Twelve year old me learned to type fast from flaming my
| opponents during StarCraft: Brood War public 1:1 Lost
| Temple matches.
|
| Gotta type the message and send as quick as possible:
| those SCVs ain't gonna start mining minerals or vespene
| gas on their own; supply depots won't build themselves.
| itintheory wrote:
| MUDs did it for me. Type faster or DIE!
| shostack wrote:
| Gemstone III and Dragonrealms had me at 90wpm with near
| 100% accuracy at a young age. Way better than Mavis
| Beacon.
| btilly wrote:
| My 14 year old types faster than most adults. And has
| been able to do so for a couple of years. She wanted the
| skill for the game One Hour, One Life and there are free
| typing apps out there.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I was about 9 or 10 years old when this moment happened
| mind you, I was typing with two fingers, one on each
| hand, nowadays I use at least three or four fingers per
| hand to type, which is a lot faster.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Ah. I misread. Thank you.
| amatecha wrote:
| I was about to disagree, but I realized that 12 year olds
| typing fast is probably even more rare now than it was
| when I was 12. Let's just say, in the days of dialup lol
| ;) At the time, I typed faster than anyone I knew, other
| than a couple computer-geek friends who also spent hours
| chatting online etc.
| gabereiser wrote:
| This is prime example of good parenting. I did something
| similar with my kids. I'll let you play but I want your
| logins, in exchange for being transparent about your
| goings on, I'll grind some for you while you sleep or
| help you defeat that hard mob. Sometimes even joining in
| on the fun myself with my own account to make sure the
| group is playing nicely. That all strangers are enemies
| come to take their loots. And that eve-online isn't the
| only game out there with cunning scammery.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > And that eve-online isn't the only game out there with
| cunning scammery.
|
| I've recently met a few old school Eve players, I never
| joined back in its golden days, but basically that's been
| my take away is that everyone on that game was a sketchy
| scammer, extracting data and information from other
| players off the game to take advantage of their location.
| meowface wrote:
| Former old-school EVE player and sketchy scammer here.
| Pretty true, yeah, but keep in mind it's in-world
| scamming and is considered a valid or even respected part
| of the game. I doubt most of them would consider ever
| scamming or defrauding people IRL or find that remotely
| acceptable. It's a role play. (I stopped playing long
| before the official ability to exchange things for real-
| world money was available, though. For me it was all just
| exchange of shiny pixels.)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| No doubt! Thank you for clarifying for those who might
| misunderstand. I've heard it described as a fancy game of
| Excel with space ships as well. What I was describing is
| people joining other Eve Corps TeamSpeak / Ventrilo
| servers and listening in for key details, and using that
| intel to rip off other players. Not anyone IRL.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| A somewhat contrarian view. I've always viewed Roblox
| suspiciously. However, at the same time, I believe it is fairly
| harmless as long as your child remains in the confines of
| Roblox and isn't lured into other social networks like
| Instagram, Snapchat or similar which I think can be effectively
| monitored and restricted.
|
| I think that the big advantage of Roblox is that just like it
| is a decent game sandbox, it is also a good real life sandbox
| where children can safely learn about the online world, the
| risks and how to mitigate them (good passwords, never share
| your passwords, don't tell random strangers private information
| like your name, etc.). Assuming, I can prevent them from
| getting lured into other social networks, the worst that can
| happen is that they lose their Roblox account when they make an
| inevitable mistake. In my view, it's better that they learn
| these lessons in Roblox, at an early age, rather than later
| with social accounts or, worse, financial accounts.
|
| Roblox' problems can be a useful educational tool.
| adbachman wrote:
| You just replied to an actual experience of predatory
| behavior with the statement, "it is fairly harmless".
|
| > "It is also a good real life sandbox where children can
| safely learn about the online world"
|
| It's not, though. That's the point of this article and the
| comment you replied to. Again and again, it is _not_ a safe
| sandbox for learning.
|
| You don't prepare children for the world by handing them off
| to predators with a "we tried" level of safety in place, you
| do it by removing the predators.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Or teach your kids how to avoid the predators, since
| predators will always be around.
|
| I don't agree that the best course of action is to shield
| your children from every negative consequence of the world.
| But I guess I shouldn't be speaking as someone who doesn't
| have a kid. (We've been trying, and hopefully IVF will
| work.)
|
| But I do have a lot of second-hand experience with nieces
| and family friends. Maturity level varies dramatically
| between kids, and it seems like a mistake to take a one-
| size-fits-all "Internet is scary" approach to parenting.
|
| Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends. If you
| get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the
| losing end of a years-long battle.
| deelowe wrote:
| Children are not little adults. You cannot place the same
| expectations on them as you would an adult. Education or
| not. I've personally witnessed my kids doing things they
| knew they shouldn't and were specifically warned against,
| yet were surprised when the outcome matched what they
| were told would happen. In this case it was someone
| offering free stuff via steam and my son's account was
| stolen.
| supersync wrote:
| I think your example is actually a counter example.
|
| This is also how most people, regardless of age, learn.
|
| The key is - did you have to warn your son again?
|
| I subscribe to natural consequence parenting within
| guardrails. People learn from experience reliably, the
| key is to allow manageable consequences.
| dkersten wrote:
| Experiences to learn from aren't created equally though.
| Getting your steam account stolen is one thing, getting
| exploited by sexual predators is quite another. Some
| experiences are good for learning, others may lead to
| long term consequences or developmental or mental
| problems.
|
| The point people are making here is that your child is
| not on an equal playing field with the predator. The
| predators have an overwhelming advantage.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Also known as a learning experience. :) I lost my
| Asheron's Call account the same way.
|
| You're right, of course. Some experiences are worse than
| others. And it's worth protecting kids from as much
| negativity as possible.
| deelowe wrote:
| Maybe not as much as possible, but I definitely think
| online predators is on the list.
| abirch wrote:
| Exactly it's the consequences of what could happen. It's
| good for kids to learn the hard way most of the time, but
| I'm not letting my kid swim in shark infested water so
| that they learn about the value of signs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > teach your kids how to avoid the predators, since
| predators will always be around.
|
| One concrete action in that vein is "we taught our child
| to avoid Roblox".
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Roblox is not the predator. There's a learning
| opportunity for discernment here, if you child is mature
| enough for that lesson. If he's not, well, play with him
| to the extent you have the time.
| dkersten wrote:
| Roblox is also a predator. They are exploiting children
| for money, through the user generated content and
| marketplaces. They take an incredibly large cut from
| everything sold and then have crazy high thresholds
| before you can cash out. Roblox might not be sexual
| predators, but they are predators.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Dark alleys at 3 AM in inner cities aren't the predator
| either. The Everglades swamp isn't the predator either.
|
| One good strategy to avoid being preyed upon is to avoid
| places where the risk of predators is unacceptably high.
| baskethead wrote:
| If you do have a kid, you'll learn that every single
| experience you've had with other kids amounts to nothing.
| Having a lifelong commitment to another human and trying
| your hardest to make them the best person they can be,
| often against their own will, is something that you can't
| replicate with all the nieces and family friends in the
| world.
|
| Pedophiles are extremely extremely clever and know
| exactly how to manipulate their targets. Just like spam,
| they don't go for every kid but they target the ones they
| know they can manipulate. If your child happens to be the
| target of a pedophile it's extremely, extremely
| difficult. We had some close calls on Roblox because my
| kid was an early reader/writer/typer so I was watching
| everything he was doing and cut away as soon as weird
| stuff started happening and then I deleted the app
| entirely. Now he's on Minecraft but I have a dedicated
| Minecraft server and only his friends play on it.
|
| There are certain dangers that you can safely expose your
| children to with limited negative or even good
| consequences. Learning how to carefully climb structures
| at a young age is a great skill and if they fall down,
| they learn to be more careful. Learning your own limits
| at a young age is great. If they break their arm doing a
| skateboarding trick, that sucks, but they will learn more
| about conquering fear from bouncing back.
|
| Getting conned into sending nude photos or being roped
| into the virtual hands of a pedophile are quite often
| things that kids have an extremely hard time recovering
| from. It's basically like sending your kid to play on the
| highway and expecting them to "learn" from the
| experience. "Well, they can learn how to be careful
| around moving cars!" is a ridiculous statement when the
| entire environment is dangerous and the outcomes are
| extremely binary.
|
| It's easier to teach them how to avoid predators when
| they're much older, but Roblox is targeted for much
| younger kids.
| cassac wrote:
| It's just that kids, despite their best efforts, are
| really stupid. Think about how much effort is put into
| teaching them to look both ways before crossing the
| street and that is an easy concept to understand.
| abirch wrote:
| Kids are inexperienced as well as impulsive. My wife and
| I joke, "why can't our kids have the perspective of
| middle aged people?"
| cjcole wrote:
| First of all, I wish you luck with your effort to have
| children.
|
| It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal
| cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
|
| "One key part of that trajectory is the development of
| the prefrontal cortex, a significant part of the brain,
| in terms of social interactions, that affects how we
| regulate emotions, control impulsive behavior, assess
| risk and make long-term plans. Also important are the
| brain's reward systems, which are especially excitable
| during adolescence. But these parts of the brain don't
| stop growing at age 18. In fact, research shows that it
| can take more than 25 years for them to reach maturity."
|
| So, yes, teach your children how to avoid predators. That
| is excellent. But this is the last line of defense. Since
| children have major impulse control and emotional
| regulation deficits and the predators have a major
| asymmetrical advantage in behavioral engineering, it is
| overwhelmingly the job of the parents to the extent
| possible to just keep the predators away.
|
| > "Internet is scary"
|
| Damn right it is. Children are uniquely impressionable
| and imprintable for a long time. Seeing or being forced
| to do gnarly stuff at the wrong time is permanently
| disfiguring.
|
| > Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends.
|
| Yes, the traditional way that would happen is at
| someone's house. Together. In person. Which provides some
| level of protection against predation and a
| fuller/richer/healthier social experience. Where the
| venue is virtual those protections are lost and more
| vigilance is required.
|
| > If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find
| yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.
|
| There are wolves in the world. There always have been and
| always will be (as you say). It's a never ending and
| virtually thankless job (in fact, you will regularly be
| abused for doing it), but keeping the wolves at bay is
| parenting job #1. Get them to maturity whole, healthy,
| intact, and self-sufficient.
|
| I'm not going to share experiences to the extent of the
| OP, but I have kids and I've met some wolves.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > keeping the wolves at bay is parenting job #1. Get them
| to maturity whole, healthy, intact, and self-sufficient.
|
| Keeping the wolves at bay is an impossible task. Reducing
| the exposure to the wolves, educating on recognizing the
| wolves, and mitigating the negative consequences of the
| wolves is a far more viable set of goals.
| concordDance wrote:
| > It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal
| cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
|
| That's a myth, there was a hn article on it a few months
| back. Could just as easily have selected 12 iirc.
| verall wrote:
| > It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal
| cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
|
| It's ridiculously cliche and infantilizing. The brain
| continues to change through your entire lifetime. Not to
| take away from the rest of your post, which I broadly
| agree with.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The context here is centered on literal children. Of
| course it's 'infantilizing'.
| xeromal wrote:
| I think they meant this as a bit of hyperbole to get the
| point across.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| I said it with the stipulation that the kids are kept
| within the confines of Roblox. Note that kids were lured
| elsewhere for anything serious - instagram, porn accounts,
| webcams, discord, whatever.
|
| It also goes without saying that they need constant
| guidance, reminders, and monitoring.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If we stipulate that bad outcomes don't occur, then
| nothing is bad.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I would love to figure out a way to filter this thread by who
| does and doesn't have children, and what ages, etc.
|
| Either way, I have a 10 year old who's played for a few years
| now. Like many here, I really tried to avoid it, and for us,
| it was the pandemic. This is just where the friends were.
|
| Anyway, I think we're doing okay with it. Back then, she was
| only allowed to play on a big screen-ish computer in a place
| where anyone in the family could she was doing -- and even
| "allowed" here feels weird, because this was never a
| discussion or a fight, that's just how things are for my
| kids, for now.
|
| So I've peeped in on the chat _a bunch,_ she just knows that
| sometimes I will be over her shoulder, and frankly I get a
| big kick out of putting on a ridiculous narrating voice for
| her little dragon role-plays.
|
| She now has her own computer that she can play in her room by
| herself if she likes -- but, and maybe this is just our
| parenting thing, we can always go into her room. If the door
| is closed, we do knock -- but I've literally never been
| "rejected" here. In fact the only time I can recall her
| requesting privacy, it was a phone call with a boy (who we
| know, whos parents we know, etc).
|
| So yeah, not that stranger danger doesn't exist, from here it
| really feels like this isn't much a function of "roblox" or
| even "the internet/computers?"
| mey wrote:
| As an outsider to Roblox I found https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
| insightful, as well as it's follow-up video
| https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I played Roblox with my kids for one day before we had to nix
| it. Even with chat disabled, most "experiences" are barely even
| games.
|
| We play real games now, or occasionally Minecraft mods. The
| frozen Minecraft adventure mod is quite fun
| RHSeeger wrote:
| There are a lot of very good, enjoyable games on Roblox.
| Bloxburg and Bee Swarm Simulator are two fun ones. There are
| also lots of horrible games on Roblox. Much like all the
| mobile app stores, you have to look hard and talk to friends
| to find good stuff.
| iasay wrote:
| Wait until they work out how build sheep fucking machines in
| Minecraft!
|
| As for Roblox I watch with one eye open and educate them.
| It's a great environment to learn distrust for others,
| particularly in Adopt Me. They learned how to not get scammed
| fairly quickly.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Honestly, I think any online platform that has chat that
| children can be a part of it going to encounter the same
| issues. You can do your best to protect and educate them. You
| can talk to them about what they're playing; get involved so
| you are more likely to notice issues. But there's always going
| to be risks. It's scary, but I don't think locking everything
| risky away from a child is the right route either.
|
| I tend to think of it like letting your child go to the park
| with friends. The risks are different, but the concept is the
| same; the only way to really remove the risk is to be watching
| them every second, which isn't overly realistic.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I don't know if the comparison really applies. In the real
| world, children can look out for each other, adults in the
| community can keep an eye. Sure, parks and things will be
| targets for sickos, but online games like roblox or social
| media like discord basically have giant billboards on them.
| There's no real way to police the behavior online like there
| is in real life.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I wasn't comparing the types of risk involved in each.
| Rather, I was saying that both things have risks, and there
| are things we can do to reduce/mitigate that risk, but
| there's no reasonable way to remove the risk completely.
| causality0 wrote:
| I'm not surprised. You could essentially build a bot to locate
| victims of child pornography/grooming by scraping the internet
| to find anywhere a roblox profile link appears next to a tiktok
| or Twitter bio link.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Please do it.
| jstarfish wrote:
| How is having a Roblox account listed alongside a
| Tiktok/Twitter account an indicator of CSA? I'd expect this
| to be a dragnet of all Roblox players who are 16+ and most
| likely to be legitimately engaged in networking/social media.
|
| If you really want to find the CSAs, I'd suggest looking for
| the accounts openly soliciting vague "donations," and links
| to _Amazon wishlists._ Still a bit noisy (e-begging is not
| inherently e- _whoring_ , but there is significant overlap).
|
| Outliers might include links to P2P payment sites (Coffee,
| Paypal, Patreon, GFM, etc. Assume BTC these days too) but in
| general kids have limited banking mobility, and large sums of
| money discovered by parents erroneously attract drug
| trafficking suspicions-- whereas material items draw no legal
| attention, can be anonymously delivered by Amazon, and can be
| successfully attributed to "friends."
|
| Also, be suspicious of your kids' friends-- even IRL ones.
| The only thing more deplorable than a pedophile's own
| grooming efforts are when they manage to turn their victims
| into recruiters. _The trust is already there_ on account of a
| proxy. All it takes is a scenario along the lines of "your
| dad won't buy you an iPad? I have a friend online who
| will..." and the rest is history.
| thom wrote:
| This sounds horrible and I'm sorry for what's happened to your
| family. When you say Roblox _seems_ to have controls, do you
| mean that disabling chat doesn't actually work? Because I've
| tried to lock my kids accounts down as much as possible and had
| convinced myself it was mostly harmless.
| Delphiza wrote:
| It was two years ago, so maybe things have changed a bit. I
| don't think the game works well without the in-game chat
| stream. If that can be disabled then perhaps some of the risk
| is gone. It is still a creepy place with a lot of 'dating' in
| the game. My daughter was also introduced to the concept of a
| furry very young. She though it was more innocent than it
| actually was.
|
| Roblox is disabled on the firewall. It will never be accessed
| again. She still plays games that are fairly locked down on
| xbox, and I trust the parental controls of Microsoft more
| than Roblox. I also put in a gryphon router to help take some
| of the load of us, as parents, policing everything.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What is a gryphon router (parent asking)
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Judging from their website, a router with parental
| controls.
| tristor wrote:
| One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned.
| It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of
| the revenue comes from "whales", users that buy large quantities.
| In a game targeted at children, who themselves don't have
| income/credit cards, it's unlikely that the "whales" are in the
| target demographic. Rather, it is likely most of the "whales" are
| adults who are spending large in order to use the in-game
| currency to exploit interactions with others.
|
| Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't
| see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing
| their business model. Their business model is essentially
| structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children
| over mobile platforms.
|
| On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for
| anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are
| targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-
| anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad
| actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even
| worse.
|
| It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer
| for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the
| same way.
| telchior wrote:
| Correction here -- Roblox largely does not have whales. Most of
| the long-time successful games just rely on quantity of players
| (with logged gameplays reaching into the billions). That may
| change / be changing but among Roblox devs you still don't see
| the "target the whales" mentality of, say, mobile game devs.
|
| It's also an absolutely wild assertion to say that a platform
| with in-game currency is encouraging pedophiles by design. I
| think Roblox is seriously screwing up here, but the way you're
| phrasing it, that's an inevitability rather than a series of
| mistakes and bad judgment.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yes. Roblox absolutely is an amoral system to draw money from
| children, but it's not particularly focused on whales.
| Rather, their current big initiative is convincing parents to
| sign their kids up for a Robux "allowance," which is a
| monthly subscription that gives the kids a certain quantity
| of Robux per week or month so they can "learn budgeting."
|
| Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue
| didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how
| these sorts of things work. There will always be a small
| percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay
| with spending a lot of it on online games.
| telchior wrote:
| Well, prepare to be surprised, I guess. A big chunk of
| revenue doesn't come from whales (for almost all games, I
| can't speak for all but know a fair amount about the
| average platform success story). That's because of the
| history of the platform and how games were designed: in a
| lot of them, the only thing to buy was one or a few
| "gamepasses", which would unlock functionality. Once you
| bought the gamepasses, that was it, there's nothing else to
| buy.
|
| The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're
| actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need,
| effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve,
| content that's actually somehow worth playing for that
| time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel
| meaty but actually give the player very little.
|
| That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of
| experienced professionals and very well understood
| principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in.
| Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are
| very different from anything else in the game industry,
| designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to
| game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in
| other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to
| playtime to conversion rate.
|
| More recently there are some games that are beginning to
| lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile
| games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of
| mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch
| -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but
| IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand
| back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there
| seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the
| company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn
| guy for outreach" thing.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Sure, but look at Roblox experiences like "Adopt Me" or
| "Bee Swarm Simulator" with gacha mechanics. Keep
| inserting a dollar and pulling the lever, maybe you'll
| get the ultra-rare diamond flying rideable pet dragon
| bee. Those games are very whale-friendly and are pulling
| serious numbers. Heck, Bee Swarm Simulator has its own
| line of toys available at Walmart now:
| https://www.walmart.com/c/brand/bee-swarm-simulator
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my
| kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens
| (and their parents)
| tristor wrote:
| $2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great
| links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this
| topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the
| majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the
| user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in
| my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent
| somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared
| to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to
| WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period).
| "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average
| user in the user base.
|
| In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out.
| People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or
| laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for
| sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents
| enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items.
| Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is
| recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when
| it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it
| doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount
| of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money
| and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid
| for.
|
| Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are
| susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I
| personally don't play these games, because I know that I am
| susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online
| gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands
| of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin
| Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is
| taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it
| to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of
| those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on
| their platform. This is pretty blatant.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-
| game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale.
| To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars
| per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time
| restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-
| game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a
| pathological amount of money.
|
| GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles.
| Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation
| or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out
| of control spending to groom more and more kids.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Roblox is a cesspool. It's like 4chan ran a games platform.
| jrockway wrote:
| I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum amount
| of communication two strangers can have on the Internet. You can
| choose 6 pre-made things to say to your opponent; Thanks, Well
| Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten. This might be too much; I
| have definitely seen people get mad from their opponent using the
| voice lines too much.
|
| My thought is that this significantly reduces the richness of the
| in-game interactions (implies less engagement, implies less
| revenue), but doesn't need moderators to keep the game from being
| used for illegal sexual encounters, which is nice if your game
| targets kids.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Elden ring offers 20 or so templates for messages and the
| ability to chain 2 templates with conjunctions for example:
| "Beware of {noun}" where noun is one of 200 or so whitelisted
| words. Kids still find creative ways to insult other players.
| telchior wrote:
| But if FromSoft cared to moderate the messages they could;
| there are a limited number of combinations that can be made.
| FromSoft instead encourages the behavior (e.g. by always
| having a few dead NPCs hanging over a railing with the butt
| facing the player), which is fine because they make games for
| adults.
|
| The annoying thing about Roblox is that they're really not
| trying to experiment and figure out what could work, instead
| hanging on to a chat model that kids definitely can hack
| around.
| xigency wrote:
| I think Among Us quick chat is actually the best example of
| this. There are hundreds of combinations of messages you can
| send along specific templates - "The body was in (location)",
| "(player) was chasing (player)", "Vote (somebody)".
|
| It's enough to have a full discussion in the emergency meetings
| without any possibility that I can see for abusive
| communication. The only weak link is the player aliases
| themselves.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum
| amount of communication two strangers can have on the
| Internet."
|
| Hello stranger on the internet .. don't you think, you used a
| bit more than "Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops,
| Threaten" here?
|
| I still understood you, though. Which is my point, I had
| awesome communications with many strangers on the internet.
| Whether in games or forums.
|
| But yes, the average online communication is quite low and
| toxic. And I had to learn to walk away or ignore most of it. So
| for small kids it is maybe a good thing, if their games do not
| have chat enabled. Which means pretadors then can only contact
| them through whatsapp, instagram, facebook, tiktok,...
|
| Pandoras Box is wide open already and blocking it all, means
| isolating your kid.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Rocket League's quick chat could be comparable (even though
| there's also freeform chat) - however it's very easy to piss
| people off via quick chat as well (e.g. spamming What A Save
| during a missed save)
| Semaphor wrote:
| > This might be too much
|
| Back when I played (early days), the common thing was indeed to
| mute opponents right when the game starts.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| In Age of Empires: Age of Kings/The Conquerors this was
| called/known as taunting. You could either do this by pre-
| defined voice taunts ("Start the game already!") or in the pre-
| game chat and during the game.
| acoard wrote:
| Yes, essentially communication is a tool and any tool in a
| multiplayer game will be abused. Without playing any
| multiplayer Hearthstone, I can guarantee that some people would
| use "Well Played" after a mistake to insult players. Just like
| how in Rocket League people spam "What a save!" after an
| embarrassing miss.
|
| I totally agree that it removes the richness. You lose out on
| any meaningful, even if small or quaint, connections, and might
| as well be interacting with an AI that triggers a "Well
| played!" at the end of the game.
|
| There's no right answer here, it's an intractable problem since
| the beginning of the internet.
|
| It reminds me of the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog
| a bit. The problem is human nature projected into the internet.
|
| > A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks
| a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the
| scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to,
| pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the
| middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible
| and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river,
| the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The
| dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the
| consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "It is in my
| nature."[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
| bee_rider wrote:
| The scorpion and the frog is my favorite fable, but I have no
| idea what the moral is supposed to be. It just seems like a
| hilariously nihilistic shaggy dog story.
| elefanten wrote:
| As a kid, I remember it being spun as "don't mess with
| evil."
|
| But as an adult, it seems like a rare (and perhaps
| valuable?) counterpoint to "don't judge other people" or
| "don't judge a book by its cover." Sometimes... those
| behaviors are adaptive.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is weird because the scorpion, of course, dies too.
| And the frog was just doing him a favor.
|
| I think the moral is supposed to be: "Some people are
| just irredeemably awful to the point that they'll self
| destruct and take you down with them if you try to help
| them" which... I guess is true but pretty jaded for a
| children's story, haha. Although, old fashioned fables do
| tend to have that dark aspect.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > You lose out on any meaningful, even if small or quaint,
| connections
|
| An 8 year old girl should have other opportunities for
| 'meaningful connections', so I don't see this as a huge loss.
| mike00632 wrote:
| I came here to say this. In Hearthstone specifically, players
| were abusing "Thanks" by saying it after their opponents made
| a blunder.
|
| Though, compare that to Facebook which knowingly allowed
| white supremacists to organize deadly attacks against BLM
| protesters, let ISIS recruit on their platform, and
| facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.
| Hearthstone is doing pretty well compared to that.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I think it's just an aspect of competition, and people's ego.
| In most competitive games, human psychology is just as
| important as any other aspect, and trash talk has been around
| since forever in order to tilt a player.
|
| I don't personally view this as a negative.
|
| It's the team-based games where kids are constantly yelling
| or berating their teammates for missteps that are far more
| annoying and negative.
| operator-name wrote:
| This works well with games like hearthstone because the game
| itself is well defined. Whereas sandboxes such as Minecraft,
| Roblox and MMOs such as Runescape, World of Warcraft would be
| greatly neutered by this restriction. An an example of this,
| the Minecraft community is currently up in arms about
| Microsoft's new chat reporting.
|
| There's also an entire category of games games (2nd life) and
| non games (omegle) which are built on communication with
| strangers. For some people that's part of why they play these
| games.
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| I get what you are saying but I see this as pretty dystopian.
| It's easy to measure the harms that happen, but what about the
| other side of the coin? What about the friends you never met
| because you couldn't speak to other people? What about the
| legal sexual encounters? Maybe even love?
|
| Especially during covid lockdowns when people were meeting much
| less in person than normal, social connection through games was
| important.
| apeace wrote:
| One of my favorite games ever was Journey, and what I loved
| most about it was how communication worked.
|
| The game was online-multiplayer, where two players would work
| their way through a series of puzzle-like rooms together. But
| they would match you with a random person and you would have no
| idea who they were, not even a screen name.
|
| Then, the only way you could communicate was by making a little
| chirping noise. Tap the button and you make a little chirp.
| Hold it down and release for a big chirp. If you weren't
| looking at the other player you would see a faint glow in their
| direction when they chirped, so they could grab your attention.
| And that was it.
|
| There were times when I would miss something and start to
| continue forward, so the other player would chirp-chirp-chirp-
| chirp to say "Wait, look over here!" I had no idea if they were
| pissed at me or being friendly about it, but given how cute the
| whole thing was I would assume the latter. It just felt nice,
| like I was meeting a new friend every time.
|
| I've gone back to that game several times over the years, but
| sadly nobody seems to be playing it anymore. My first time
| playing feels like a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can
| never be replicated. Really great game.
| rocmcd wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me about Journey! I didn't realize it
| was multiplayer the first time I played it, which speaks to
| how well it was implemented (no matchmaking, no waiting, no
| usernames, etc - you're just playing the game and someone
| appears).
|
| I still have fond memories of traipsing around the ruins in
| that game with complete strangers. The restricted
| communication made it more memorable for some reason. Plus,
| just a great game overall.
| concordDance wrote:
| This kind of insinuating nonsense is the worst of gutter
| journalism.
|
| An employee ran a pornographic blog? Their twitter retweeted
| something a pedophile made? The head of content moderation is a
| furry?
|
| So what?!
|
| This guilt by association nonsense is the law of contagion!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion
| jstarfish wrote:
| If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not
| somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children
| to. Period.
|
| The head of content moderation's personal interests are way
| off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good
| sense of what is _moderate._
|
| All of this is literally intuition, but we're being trained
| over time to ignore it in the name of sex-positivity and other
| nonsense. It's just grooming redefined.
| concordDance wrote:
| > If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not
| somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children
| to
|
| Retweeting art does not imply any knowledge of the
| "pedophilia". Also, "pedophile" is a term so general it's
| sometimes applied to things like finding people aged 17
| attractive (which is the majority of heterosexual men). As
| far as I know the artist in question might just have liked
| some hentai that had a japanese schoolgirl in at some point.
| At that point the levels of indirection in your Law of
| Contagion are absurd even by the standards of believers in
| majiks!
|
| > The head of content moderation's personal interests are way
| off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good
| sense of what is moderate.
|
| This would be just as accurate if the moderation head had an
| interest in gay sex.
|
| > All of this is literally intuition
|
| And your intuitions aren't anywhere near as strong as the
| intuitions of the 70s parents who made sure gay men weren't
| anywhere near their children. Should we have followed those
| intuitions too?
| sosodev wrote:
| Do you really think it's okay for a kids game to promote an
| artist that openly admits to being pedophile?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think I don't believe anyone who just lumps furry porn,
| cartoon images of childlike anime, and paedophilia together.
| I auto-dismiss them.
|
| _Especially_ when finding the furry porn required an
| investigation into catching said person 's non-work Twitter
| that was named pseudonymously.
|
| You guys over-index on this nonsense because outrage is a
| drug injected directly into your brain. There's enough wrong
| about this platform that could be improved, but you're all
| more interested in just raging online and so you must invent
| this whole Axis-of-Evil. This, coming from someone whose
| sexual interests are pretty damned vanilla.
| nr2x wrote:
| This isn't some low level SWE with an unusual hobby, it's the
| person whom this company is putting out as the reason parents
| should trust the product. It's absolutely idiotic on a number
| of levels.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Good, there is a special place in silicon hell for those
| marketing the idea of scrip to kids.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
|
| This company has a lot of bad karma to settle, and their profit
| model is unsustainable.
| smiddereens wrote:
| chris_wot wrote:
| If this is true, I think I'll talk to my boss tomorrow about
| getting Roblox banned on our student systems.
| concordDance wrote:
| Try understanding the scale of Roblox first before thinking of
| anecdotes as relevant.
|
| Unless you're also terrified of cardiologists? [1]
|
| [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-
| chin...
| charcircuit wrote:
| You might as well ban the internet too. And all phones. While
| you are at it make them where a gag when traveling between home
| and school to prevent them from talking to strangers.
| rtev wrote:
| Tao3300 wrote:
| If I prohibit my kids from going down a particularly unsafe
| street, that doesn't mean I'm against roads and sidewalks.
| Curious what stake you've got in this that you'd reply with
| such ridiculous hyperbole.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A brief Google suggests the problems aren't new and are very
| prevalent.
| shagie wrote:
| I'd suggest watching these to help inform your decision and
| conversation:
|
| Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
| -- https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
|
| Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. --
| https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
| zaptrem wrote:
| Similar issues have existed on lightly or unmoderated online
| games since the dawn of time. Would you support banning
| Minecraft for the same reason? I think games that encourage
| technical and creative thinking stand to benefit more than they
| harm.
|
| They absolutely require closer parental supervision, though.
| Moreover, the developers at this company need to crack down on
| pedos both from without and (according to the article) within.
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