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Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse

• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• crazydoggers 10mo ago
  We need to pass laws that can make these executives serve jail time. You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
  • superkuh 10mo ago
    Or the parents. I wasn't aware the corporations were responsible for the raising of children. That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
    • jswelker 10mo ago
      I agree 100%, but it is fair to point out there is really no precedent for the level of involvement and knowledge and handholding it takes for a parent to navigate the digital world. Yes parents are widely failing, but it should be no surprise.
    • quantified 10mo ago
      Parents understand that they cannot be the sole arbiter of everything for their children. Locking down your children's inputs is not fully realistic. If you remember being a child you remember circumventing your parents at every turn.
      • Ajedi32 10mo ago
        And so instead we should expect corporations to fill that role?
        • quantified 10mo ago
          I'm not sure that's implied anywhere. There are many non-parental roles to be filled in society that should steer harm away feom children. Priests for example. Teachers and librarians, nurses, bus drivers, shopkeepers, and so on.
      • superkuh 10mo ago
        Yes. At the tail end of my comment I stated that calls for violence (forced imprisonment) against either CEO (like original poster in this thread) or parents (like me, as satire) for not sanitizing a child's entire life is wrong. Both are wrong. There isn't even a problem here. Certainly not one that requires the use of force to deprive humans of their volition.
    • hrimfaxi 10mo ago
      Our parents had problems figuring out how to program the time on the VCR. Technology advances faster than parents can keep up. If someone was selling drugs on the street on the way to school, would we be blaming parents who let their kids walk to school that they should parent better, or would we deal with the drug dealer?
      • zeroCalories 10mo ago
        Oh yeah, I remember 20 years ago when the Internet was fine for a child to brows unsupervised.
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
        • hrimfaxi 10mo ago
          If you think the internet today is anything like it was 20 years ago, I don't know what to tell you
      • fragmede 10mo ago
        If we think a drug dealer on the way to school is a good analogy, I have to ask; many someones went into a school with guns and shot children. How did we deal with that?
        • dylan604 10mo ago
          > How did we deal with that? We haven't. It keeps happening. Now what?
  • zzzeek 10mo ago
    Agree, in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it. The world does not need to have a Roblox app (my 11 year old would disagree very much)
    • andsoitis 10mo ago
      > Agree, in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it This is patently untrue. We are exposed to risk, incl. death, from products and services every day. Nothing can be 100% safe, nor would it be wise to aim for it. The benefits, as they say, often outweigh the cost.
      • GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
        the benefits of roblox?
        • andsoitis 10mo ago
          > the benefits of roblox? Roblox has tens of millions of daily active users. I'm guessing they would say it is a great way to entertain themselves and to spend time with others, amongst others.
    • iamnothere 10mo ago
      > in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it I’ll keep this in mind the next time I pick up some acetylene or muriatic acid.
      • zzzeek 10mo ago
        Acetylene is being marketed to children as something fun to play with ?
        • iamnothere 10mo ago
          They literally said dangerous products couldn’t be sold to consumers in general. Obvious nonsense or chainsaws would require a license. I am pushing back against the safetyist notion that unsafe products cannot or should not be sold to the public.
  • tyleo 10mo ago
    I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. As another response mentioned, we wouldn't tolerate this in any other industry. If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." I don't get why so many folks are willing to say that with harms caused by tech companies. Scale is no excuse either, "at our scale we just can't handle all the content." If anything it makes the problem more pressing to address.
    • masfuerte 10mo ago
      > If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." But we do! Acute harm is bad but chronic harm is, apparently, fine.
    • Analemma_ 10mo ago
      Yes, it's absurd how tech considers "but we're too big" to be a legitimate reason for inaction. That would get handcuffs clapped on you in any other industry. What happened to "too big to fail" being a sign of deep corruption requiring immediate action and breaking up companies?
      • dylan604 10mo ago
        Really? How many handcuffs were clapped in the Too Big To Fail 2008 financial crisis? Why we think other large corporations with infinite funds would ever face consequences? This forum is funny in how when discussing the failures of tech seem to think it it is isolated from the rest of the corporate world, yet when discussing non-tech corporations are constantly lamenting that the corporate veil of protection is impenetrable.
    • fragmede 10mo ago
      > If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say, "it's on the parents." Isn't that how moralizing about the health benefits of a McDonalds-based diet go?
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • parasubvert 10mo ago
    What law is being broken?
    • crazydoggers 10mo ago
      I literally said we need to pass laws to make it illegal. (ie knowingly allowing child trafficking or exploitation on your service)
• bmurphy1976 10mo ago
  It's a nightmare managing all this stuff. Roblox, Minecraft, Meta Quest services, Fortnite, the list goes on and on. These companies are not helping us either. Thankfully my son and his friends have somehow iterated away from Fortnite. It's no longer cool so they just stopped playing it. That's one less thing I have to worry about.
  • andsoitis 10mo ago
    what have they replaced Fortnite with? more physical play or something digital?
    • Pet_Ant 10mo ago
      Physical play is nigh impossible. It means getting other kid's parents to let them out. And then you need to spend your full-time supervising them. Can't just let them out with their bikes on the streets. I think the problem is that either you can give children freedom to explore the world, or you can make them accountable for their actions. Can't have both, and parents will protect their kids by not letting them get into trouble.
      • coryrc 10mo ago
        You can't let them out because they keep getting killed by automobiles. https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highest-numbers-since-1981-and-an-action-to-end-this-trend/ https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highes... https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-in-the-us-by-year/ https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i... https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger-kids-being-injured-and-killed-in-frontover-suv-blind-zone-incidents/3119237/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
        • PunchyHamster 10mo ago
• wslh 10mo ago
  I want to share a small story a close friend told me. His son is eleven. Every Saturday he goes to tennis class. He's good at it, sure, but the important part is that he loves it. One Saturday, though, he refused to go. Why? Because there was a special Roblox event happening at the same time. His father tried reasoning with him, the kid, agrees, a bit reluctantly. But when the father walks into the bar, he sees a dozen kids all locked to their screens, playing the same Roblox event. Roblox is an obvious form of manipulation, but honestly, we're not much better. Adults scroll under the influence of algorithmic dopamine loops. If the tobacco class action was once the benchmark for corporate harm, it may someday look tiny compared to what's coming (I hope).
  • iamnothere 10mo ago
    How is this different from a LAN party? I spent countless hours engrossed in DOOM deathmatches and Starcraft games as a kid. I don’t really see the difference. The problem outlined in the article is about moderation of spaces where kids are present. You seem to be trying to draw some broader conclusion that video games are harmful.
    • herbst 10mo ago
      Color me naive but we're there micropayments, sex and actual gambling in DOOM?
      • iamnothere 10mo ago
        OP didn’t mention those, the focus was on a room of kids “locked” to their screens as if that was the primary issue. That’s what I was responding to.
      • gomox 10mo ago
        I think porn came slightly later, in Duke Nukem 3D
    • wslh 10mo ago
      > You seem to be trying to draw some broader conclusion that video games are harmful. I never said video games are harmful. I talked about manipulation of people of all ages at a planetary scale.
• tjungblut 10mo ago
  I'll probably get DV to oblivion for this, but I have to constantly wonder where those parents come from that need to forbid their children to roam freely on the internet. Didn't they grow up in an age unrestricted web either? By now we must have two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe World of Warcraft, MSN, Whatsapp and ICQ. Oh and the p0rn... I mean, seriously, do you guys have nothing else to do than to moderate your kids Minecraft servers?
  • huflungdung 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • darkwizard42 10mo ago
    Because the internet is far more optimized at capturing your attention and encouraging terrible behavior (purchases, viruses, scams, etc.) When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads. To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.
    • soperj 10mo ago
      i don't think the situation was that different. You could mind rot yourself on shfifty-five and all sorts of terrible content. People are just making an educated decision that that's not what they want for their kids. Parenting, how bout it.
  • recursive 10mo ago
    The internet used to be that forest on the edge of town. Once in a while you might find some drug paraphernalia there. Now it's the Las Vegas strip with billboards for hookers and blow.
    • Spivak 10mo ago
• endymion-light 10mo ago
  I looked at Roblox recently as a nostalgia trip as I was active in the community over a decade ago when I was a kid. Genuinely insane that it's legal. Full dark gambling patterns, insane access. I think the only reason it's not been regulated is that people haven't looked closely, but it's as if someone took the worst of gacha games and decided to base their childrens platform on it.
  • herbst 10mo ago
    I am watching YouTubers showing these things for years to the public. Somehow people don't really seem to care at all. Roblox is really really weird.
    • fragmede 10mo ago
      > Somehow people don't really seem to care at all. > I am watching YouTubers showing these things for years to the public. I'm confused, aren't "YouTubers who make videos about the problem" people? They seem to care so much that they've put money, time, and energy into creating videos illustrating the problem.
      • lenerdenator 10mo ago
        They're people, but they're not politicians or regulators with the ability to do anything about it. At a certain point, you need to have a statute that says "thou shalt not offer cybersex and online gambling to children", and you need someone with the statutory authority to charge Roblox with doing so and penalize them after due process. Either we don't have that statute, or the people with the statutory authority don't enforce things like they should.
        • socalgal2 10mo ago
          > you need someone with the statutory authority to charge Roblox Roblox didn't put up the content. Some user did. The user should be charged.
• vegadw 10mo ago
  There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord. I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too. This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc. I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no" Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst? That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter. This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too. I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious: Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business. Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
• geephroh 10mo ago
  If you haven't listened to the interview[1], it's is absolutely bananas. Baszucki might want to think about dialing back on the ketamine a bit. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-child-safety.html?ref=platformer.news https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-...
  • api 10mo ago
    I do legit wonder about K abuse in this whole crowd. Anyone hear any excerpts from Thiel’s Antichrist lectures? I’ve never been on the same page as him politically but this wasn’t “wow I really disagree” material. This was “are you… okay, man?” material. It was just askew and bizarre. I’m not a big Thunberg fan either but I cannot replicate the thought process that would lead to mentioning her as a potential Antichrist prototype. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing, just the easiest to explain. One thing I learned way back in college: if someone seems like they are on drugs, they may be on drugs. Either that or these guys are in some weird echo chambers.
    • silenced_trope 10mo ago
      > I’m not a big Thunberg fan either but I cannot replicate the thought process that would lead to mentioning her as a potential Antichrist prototype. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing, just the easiest to explain. I know he doesn't like Greta, I don't either. But I didn't see his lecture, he theorizes that she may be the antichrist? lol
      • cess11 10mo ago
        Yes. Robert Evans recently did a decent summary of Thiel's project with ACTS 17 for the podcast Behind the Bastards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtR7ny9TuCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtR7ny9TuCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXhyx-vVG_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXhyx-vVG_Y
    • port11 10mo ago
      I'm not sure they're on K, it's highly disabling and wears out super quick. Most of the things they say sound like microdosed synthetic amphetamines: you're still functioning quite well in terms of thought but all shame and empathy are gone (plus you think you're awesome and get irritated easily). Source: used drugs extensively.
• bstsb 10mo ago
  disclaimer: slightly biased as i've made USD from Roblox it's really interesting to me seeing the debate around age verification from both sides. many Roblox developers and users seems to think that it's the end of the platform: > Awesome! We love mandatory identity checks and age verification on every major social platform. Nobody needs privacy online. Thank you Roblox. > No just no. This won’t work, this is too enforcing on the users and greatly invades our privacy and then on the other side we have people saying it's a token gesture that doesn't go far enough: > It could have adopted age verification before a wave of state legislation signaled that it would soon become mandatory anyway my personal view on the matter is that, while age verification certainly reduces privacy, it was basically the only option left for Roblox to pursue - it's a move that absolutely will reduce child abuse on their platforms, and make it safer for kids to play online. they also have one of the best privacy policies for age verification around. (for context, they delete facial geometry immediately and store IDs for 30 days maximum. one alternative, Persona, used to hold IDs for up to six years, and currently have no set time limit on how long they keep other personal information)
  • watwut 10mo ago
    > t's a move that absolutely will reduce child abuse on their platforms, and make it safer for kids to play online. Playing an online game under your own name exposes you to entirely new and massively more acute level of risk practically immediately. Absolutely no way I would allow my kids to give their real names to a game.
    • bstsb 10mo ago
      the signup page states in the Username box "Don't use your real name", and the facial verification doesn't need any personal details
• api 10mo ago
  I’ve come to see this as a general rule: trash maximizes engagement. By trash I basically mean either porn or gambling. By porn I don’t just mean the sexual kind but also political rage porn, etc. By gambling I mean anything that exploits the kinds of dopamine hooks that a slot machine exploits. There are many variations of these things but those are the basic forms. Those are the kinds of things you get if you optimize for engagement. You also get more predators and trolls because those are the kinds of people who create the most engaging content. This isn’t new. It’s been known since mass media was invented. “If it bleeds it leads,” the P.T. Barnum principle of “any publicity is good publicity,” and so on. What I think is new is the degree of individualized hyper optimization two way digital platforms allow. They let us turn this so far up that apps on a little pocket computer can start rivaling cigarettes for addictive qualities and psychological harm.
• dimal 10mo ago
  We have a culture where we’ve been told for decades that market forces and the profit motive are sufficient for running a society. That the market will find a way to give everyone what they need efficiently without problems. We’ve dispensed with ethics as a basis for human interaction, and the results are exactly what one would expect: a dystopia. And the people making the most money off this system insist that it’s all for the best and that we should double down on this strategy. Any mention of putting limits on greed and exploitation is met with responses like, “what are you, a socialist?” as if the only two choices for structuring a society are either a rapacious hyper-exploitative capitalism and an oppressive Soviet state, and there’s no other option. Capitalism needs constraints. Capitalism in the service of society can be a great thing. Capitalism without constraints is a cancer that will destroy everything in the pursuit of profit.
  • api 10mo ago
    If humans were much more rational this would work better. The human brain is loaded with exploits, and capitalism being an excellent optimizer quickly finds and uses these exploits. Because they work, and more importantly they are way way easier than creating actual value. A casino is more profitable than a hospital. Quack medicine sold with sensationalism is more profitable than real medicine. Porn is more profitable than good film or literature. Rage inducing click bait is more profitable than actual news or thoughtful editorial. It’s kind of just thermodynamics. These things require less energy input, and they don’t have to “work” because they exploit security vulnerabilities in the dopamine system instead. We are hacking each other to death.
  • stronglikedan 10mo ago
    > Capitalism needs constraints. I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.
    • swed420 10mo ago
      > I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today. But "regulated" capitalism inevitably leads to crony capitalism. What we've arrived at can barely even be called capitalism, and old school capitalism paved the way: https://web.archive.org/web/20220331174542/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-have-upended-how-modern-capitalism-works.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220331174542/https://nymag.com...
• jswelker 10mo ago
  Parents do need to be more involved in keeping kids off this stuff. But it is going to be a lot easier to coerce a handful of exploitative companies to clean up their acts than to coerce millions of individuals parents to do better.
  • parasubvert 10mo ago
    Same as it always was. Reminds me of Tipper Gore with the panic to put explicit lyrics labels on records.
• ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  Related: Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477
• ciarlill 10mo ago
  I didn't grow up with Roblox. I did grow up gambling pogs and MTG cards. I did grow up getting verbally sexually harassed at a Chuck-e-cheese. I did grow up finding my uncle's porno mag collection. I also did grow up playing Ultima Online with a group of people who knew I was a kid and helped and guided me through some really hard times with compassion. It's easy to focus on the amplification these platforms have on all the negative parts of our society. And it's a valid criticism . But it also should equally amplify the positive outcomes that occur from finding a community when you live in a bad situation or one with limited positive outcomes. As usual education is key here and unfortunately our education system (and parents) will never be able to keep up with the pace of advancement. There is no room for nuance or gray areas in our society, everything is too polarized and personal responsibility is non existent.
  • y-c-o-m-b 10mo ago
    Education will not be enough. They actually teach about this stuff in school and give plenty of warnings believe it or not. I also gave lectures and installed FamilyLink and put restrictions on my router to prevent my child from accessing devices in a way I didn't approve of or when I couldn't adequately supervise it. The sneaky little shit still found ways to circumvent all this both here at home and at school. My child completely ignored all the warnings and eventually got roped into talking to a very sick predatory individual over Roblox. The Roblox creep convinced my child to sign up for Instagram where they were able to get on video calls often. They then made my child watch them do very disturbing things, including attempting to hang themselves, cutting themselves open, and other very sick shit that I would have never imagined. They then threatened my child that if it was reported, they would kill our entire family. This went on for a couple of years apparently and we're still dealing with the trauma and fallout of it years later. Authorities were unable to determine the identity of the individual due to the many layers of obfuscation (fake names, VPN usage, etc). I'm a software engineer of nearly 20 years and very knowledgeable of tech. The fact that this still happened despite my many roadblocks and safe-guards I put in place really shocked me to the core. Not to mention the whole "am I terrible parent" question which naturally arises out of all this. I've been reassured that I did everything I could reasonably do to prevent it, but that question always weighs on my mind regardless. I warn every parent I can to keep their kids off Roblox and other "community driven" games that are like this.
• dimal 10mo ago
  Hmm. This was on the front page, generating lots of discussion. Now it’s hidden. What’s up HN? How is this not a relevant article here?
  • parasubvert 10mo ago
    it usually devolves into a mess of a comments section because it's about freedom vs. control / moral panic vs. apathy.
  • AznHisoka 10mo ago
    I think they have some of algorithm that pushes down articles with too high a comment/upvote ratio
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • roadside_picnic 10mo ago
    HN is heavily biased towards silencing any content that makes any subset of its readership uncomfortable. This policy exists under the mistaken (I hope) assumption that silence is not fundamentally biased, which is usually not the case. Posts about climate change, Israel/Palestine, uncomfortable concerns about the state of the industry etc will very often disappear quickly once they hit the home page. Of course silence about climate change is beneficial for those contributing the most to it, silence about Israel/Palestine is very beneficial to Israel, and clearly silence about lack of concern for child safety by major tech companies benefits those companies.
    • beeflet 10mo ago
      The real-world conditions are beneficial to israel. I don't think yapping about it will resolve the conflict any more than it did for tibet. What more can be said about the matter? Some pro-palestine organization will accuse Israel of genocide, and Israelis will continue bulldozing inch by inch. As for "uncomfortable concerns about the state of the industry", those are on the front page and top of /active regularly
• d_sem 10mo ago
  I think the primary issue is that there is massive demand for adolescent social interaction in a world that is increasingly physically isolating for kids. Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.
  • syntaxing 10mo ago
    Ehh, I grew up in the suburbs in the 90s. We were fine. I would hang out with the neighborhood kids unsupervised all day long even when I was single digits old. The issue is with American culture and how it shifted into a low trust society.
    • jaredklewis 10mo ago
      I think the parent is saying what you had is now not possible, because the neighbors don’t have kids. I’m in the burbs. Nearest kid is 4 door downs. Nearest kid the same age as my kid is two blocks over. Most people are 60+. Anecdata but I think this is what the parent comment is asserting anyway.
      • darth_avocado 10mo ago
        Yeah, homeownership within young families is ridiculously out of reach, which makes “young suburbs” a difficult thing to maintain. Anecdotally, we are a young family and there’s very few other ones in the neighborhood that are in the similar boat as us. As compared to what I heard from the older neighbors, when they had kids, all the others around also had kids. So many in fact that all the neighbors had doors in their backyards that opened into all the other neighbors yards, so the kids would just run around without having to go into the streets.
  • whyenot 10mo ago
    I suspect that helicopter parenting is a much larger contributor than physical isolation. We have had sparse suburbs in the US since at least the 1950s, and generations of kids grew up in that environment and did just fine.
• ecommerceguy 10mo ago
  I was surprised to see a children's game is publicly traded. So there is no real incentive to protect children, just max extract as much money as possible.
  • onetokeoverthe 10mo ago
    [dead]
• ghusto 10mo ago
  I check out my kids screen every so often to see what what he's really up to. After the panic of recent weeks, I looked more closely at Roblox, and spoke to my kid about it. It could very well be that I'm being naive, or even stupid, but from what I could see the panic is coming from parents who don't feel like being parents. That is to say, they think the world should be safe for their kids, with no actual responsibility required from them to educate and engage with their own children.
• throwaway_4566 10mo ago
  Anyone not thinking it's that bad, watch the following. Here's a single example of a perpatrator that got away with it for too long. He admits to "contacting four to five children every day for the past year." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zD1LM8E-y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zD1LM8E-y8
  • yread 10mo ago
    What a strange video. Showing full faces of not just the 17 year old guy who was asking for naughty pictures of 15 year olds but for some reason also his father and brother. And they talk to him without a lawyer present? And all this is published even before the first court hearing?
• andrew_gs 10mo ago
  I have 10 year old twin boys, they play roblox with their friends from school, and they have a lot of fun. Importantly though they don't use the in-game chat, they fire up a group voice call on messenger kids and chat to each other through that while playing their games. They play in the lounge and I can keep a bit of an eye on what they're doing. Most of roblox is a trash fire, but there a couple of games that seem pretty fun when used as an activity for the kids to get together and chat and play.
  • chasd00 10mo ago
    > Importantly though they don't use the in-game chat, they fire up a group voice call on messenger My 15 year old does this. I thought it was interesting, he and his friends just start a call, put it on speaker, and then talk to each other while gaming. My youngest (now 13) played a lot of Roblox when he was younger but lost interest. We’ve talked a lot about the risks and how robux is a scam, he’s even run across “gooners” in game. It reminds me of hanging out at the mall with my friends when I was his age. Plenty of risk there and you need to know how to deal with it. I remember once being offered a ride home by a stranger, the total child kidnapping stereotype, I just said something like “is this a joke?” and they took off.
• Walt-Stevens21 10mo ago
  [dead]
• foota 10mo ago
  It's interesting to me to think about a possible system where people in say roblox can only chat with each other by exchanging physical keys somehow. This way, they would be able to chat with their peers from school etc., without the danger or need for as much supervision. I don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.
  • interloxia 10mo ago
    They could sell custom ubikeys/whatever. Kids love Tonies. A custom USB stick/NFC/air tag would be "easy" and profitable.
    • ash_091 10mo ago
      NFC tags in custom "avatars" unique to and customizable by each kid, turning friends into collectables? I would've been all over that in my early teens.
  • darth_avocado 10mo ago
    That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know. Edit: There’s two problems that need to be solved. Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time. And corporations need to prioritize safety more than they do now. It dumbfounds me how many times I get called the N word on Xbox and nothing happens after I report it. It’s almost 2026, it’s not that hard people.
    • robot-wrangler 10mo ago
      What important aspects of gameplay are destroyed by age-restricting DMs?
      • darth_avocado 10mo ago
        Parent doesn’t talk about age restrictions on DMs and nor do I. We are talking about physical keys and only being restricted to peers that you’d know from school for online play.
• autoexec 10mo ago
  > Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff? CEOs acting like selfish psychopaths indifferent to the suffering of others shouldn't really surprise anyone at this point. Why expect tech CEOs to act differently? Of course he's nothing but annoyed that people keep complaining about how his digital child casino allows pedophiles and corporate advertisers to prey on children without oversight, or about how he's exploiting children for labor, or about how he's psychologically manipulating kids to feel anxiety and FOMO so that he can sell them more Robux. If he were capable of empathy for the victims of his platform he wouldn't have designed his platform to create victims in the first place. He doesn't give a shit about the safety of children, he only cares about himself and how much money he's making.
• Animats 10mo ago
  > Since 2018, at least two dozen people in the United States have been arrested and accused of abducting or abusing victims they met on Roblox, according to a 2024 investigation by Bloomberg. So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church. Roblox has a strange demographic problem. Their average user age is around 14. They keep trying to push that up, at least to high school age where there's more spending power. Or so said one of their annual reports. But they just can't retain the early teens into the high school years. This is the same problem as Chat Control. You let people talk, sometimes they're going to talk about things they're Not Supposed To Talk About. The amount of censorship needed to prevent this goes way beyond Orwell ever dreamed of. Roblox claims a goal of cutting off wrongspeak within 100ms. They're trying pretty hard. That's a concern - an AI listening to everything you say and evaluating it for political correctness. Kids have been able to access Pornhub, etc. for more than a decade, and not much seems to have happened. Teen sex is down, not up. The graphics in Roblox are so bad that sex there is silly, not obscene, anyway. This belongs to a long series of non-problems, along with the Hayes Code, the 1950s Congressional hearings on comic books, the Meese Report, and such. Amusingly, we aren't hearing much from the religious right any more; they aligned with MAGA, and now they're stuck defending Trump's sex life. If anything, the Roblox problem is a subset of the too much screen time problem.
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  • ch2026 10mo ago
    > So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church. Yep. I’ve not witnessed something so wildly over exaggerated since D&D was responsible for widespread satanic cults in the 80’s.
    • crazydoggers 10mo ago
• tschellenbach 10mo ago
  Feels like this should be solved at the iOS/Android/Windows/Sony level. Parents should configure settings in 1 place. Not once for each game.
  • ch2026 10mo ago
    How is an OS setting going to protect a child from the realities that people on the internet, especially anonymous people, may be creepy?
• stego-tech 10mo ago
  > Over and over again, we have seen leaders in Baszucki's position choose growth over guardrails. Safety features come out years after the need for them is identified, if at all. Internal critics are sidelined, laid off, or managed out. And when journalists ask, politely but insistently, why so many of their users are suffering, executives laugh and tell us that we're the crazy ones. Definitely the larger vibe in tech at the moment. Safety is overwhelmingly not a priority, anywhere, to any leader, no matter how loudly specific proponents scream that "ahkshually, it is." Thing is, I taste the Kool-Aid each company offers. From tiny businesses to a household name SV enterprise, I give each the benefit of the doubt that this time, they're doing things right. This time, they're taking safety seriously. This time, they care about their employees. I really, truly, sincerely tried giving them all the benefit of the doubt that they see things I don't. After this past forced career change, I finally gave up that exercise in futility. Actions speak infinitely louder than words, and taking stock of the actions of these people reveal their true intentions every time: as much money as possible for them, fuck everyone else.
• ed-209 10mo ago
  Putting aside my personal concerns and frustrations with the state of parental controls (it’s hell), what does the author propose here? By his own admission the controls which companies have been pressured to implement thus far are incomplete / can be bypassed. There is of course only one, complete solution that comes to mind - universal digital ID for all humans on the internet - which is a different kind of nightmare. But we can’t have that conversation because the author won’t stake out their position there.
  • tantalor 10mo ago
    > author won’t stake out their position Casey Newton is a journalist - it would not be appropriate for him to have a "position" on this topic.
    • jujube3 10mo ago
      If it's inappropriate for him to have a "position," he should not be saying things like claiming "Roblox is a problem"
      • darushimo 10mo ago
        No, it’s not. Just because proposing a solution would be helpful, that doesn’t require he propose a solution. Related, sometimes articulating a question in the right way is the hard part.
      • lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
        Indeed, it's editorializing. But more broadly, all journalism is necessarily axiologically loaded. Why report on X but not on Y? Obviously, because the journalist/editor/owner thinks X is "newsworthy" while Y isn't. Whether that means proposing a solution is another question. I can sympathize with annoyance at nonconstructive complaining, however. Whatever the technical/legal solution, I think an important factor is also parental involvement. If Roblox is dangerous enough, don't let your kids use it. They might get around your ban, but at least you did your part. That means a great deal already. And people circumvent and break the law all the time, but that doesn't invalidate the law, and parents are lawgivers.
• amai 10mo ago
  Roblox is rated R16 for a reason in Germany.
  • DocTomoe 10mo ago
    Since early 2025. Because it is a 'user-facing game generating engine', so there is little to no control over the actual contents someone can encounter, which may include - especially violent - material the german State deems inappropriate for people not at least 5884 days old. Communication capabilities were merely a tertiary concern - after monetization.
• tsoukase 10mo ago
  We, parents, are in a constant fight with an addictive drug with which some companies are trying to control our children through light emitted by electronic screens. My sons started playing Roblox a month ago. I allow only half an hour time limit, so that they are not get cut from their friends, no friend that they don't know in person and no cent spent for bullshit objects. Unlimited unattended hovering in Roblox, among others, is recipe for disaster.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• Svoka 10mo ago
  Honestly, just another demonstration that lay people are unable to think of groups of people larger than a hundred.
• bredren 10mo ago
  The original Leisure Suit Larry game had age verification. I did not know there was an escape key sequence from it, so failed it many times: https://youtu.be/RCV-Ka-R_Xg?si=ZXx8W0f8XtL-_p6H&t=30 https://youtu.be/RCV-Ka-R_Xg?si=ZXx8W0f8XtL-_p6H&t=30
• kitsune1 10mo ago
  [dead]
• RyanHamilton 10mo ago
  This is a sympton of something worse. The bigger issue: Roblox isn’t the real problem, it’s filling the gap left by the disappearance of unstructured, unsupervised play in the physical world. Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead. You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.
  • pupppet 10mo ago
    I don't buy this. Roblox like most games these days employ dark patterns to keep kids hooked, the real world can't compete with the online casino. We had Nintendo, but those games had an ending. Today's online games don't end.
    • renjimen 10mo ago
      It's both disappearing opportunities for physical play AND addictive platforms
      • endgame 10mo ago
        And one feeds the other, in that it's hard to raise a kid who can play constructively outdoors if all of his friends are hooked on Roblox.
    • maksum 10mo ago
      Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox
      • RyanHamilton 10mo ago
• jrm4 10mo ago
  With regard to safety in tech: Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished. Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished. NOTHING CHANGES UNTIL BAD LEADERS ARE PUNISHED. I'm all ears as to how to get this going.
  • port11 10mo ago
    Severely fine companies with these problems. That internalises the risk rather than pushing it outwards. If a company risks bankruptcy, they'll be more careful.
• cess11 10mo ago
  Roblox might be the Jeffrey Epstein of video games.
• attila-lendvai 10mo ago
  is it far fetched to consider that maybe the entire point of Roblox is to be an infamous pedo hunting ground... and as such serve as one of the reasons for ushering in mandatory digital IDs for going online? it wouldn't be the ugliest problem-reaction-solution history has seen...
• drivebyhooting 10mo ago
  > platforms wish to be judged only by their stated intentions, and almost never on the outcomes of anyone who uses them. This is a great quote and puts to words how viscerally appalled I am at Zuck’s sanctimonious exculpations.
• yieldcrv 10mo ago
  people are pointing the fingers in the wrong direction, and its contributing to their frustration until you find a way to legally tie off-platform behavior, such as on Discord, or the comment sections of a community, back to the platform Roblox itself, all CEOs are going to feel impervious and seem tone-deaf to lawsuits and the media and it is factually impervious, Roblox' moderation tactics are comprehensive, the legal system goes after the people caught sexually harassing children, the same as how the legal system would go after someone caught sexually harassing children at Chuck E Cheese as opposed to Chuck E Cheese itself or the parking lot outside where the skaters happened to be hanging out "but it's different and I'm a parent and it makes me uneasy" okay, heard.
• hintymad 10mo ago
  Honest question: In a city, we expect that the government does its job: catch the bad guys and prosecute them. Why is it not the same case when it comes to an online platform? The platforms, Roblox included, do invest millions a year to set up a safety team and to build moderate systems. The systems are not not perfect, and I doubt they will be, just like not all crimes can be resolved. So, why do we expect platforms to do job much better than the real justice systems, if not a perfect job to start with?
• tomek32 10mo ago
  Great post. I wonder though how it compares to the oil industry of decades ago. It feels they didn't have shame from the movies I remember watching as I was growing up in the 90s/00s? I remember this one vividely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4WOo8IJzVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4WOo8IJzVg
• duxup 10mo ago
  I've enjoyed Roblox with my kids. Does it ask them to buy Robux? Yup, sure does, just like many apps they encounter. IMO it's a learning opportunity. As far as safety I consider it my job to monitor them when on their devices, be present. There's no getting around that there's no magic system that will protect kids for sure, other than parental involvement.
• casey2 10mo ago
  The real problem is that games like roblox are popular at all. The exploitation done by this proprietary software platform dwarfs any issues caused by users. Mass abuse of hundreds of millions for profit >>>> minor abuse for sadistic or sexual gratification. It's a true shame that only complaints of the latter have been normalized, but for entirely the wrong reasons punishing "evildoers", rather than preventing harm. When social morals are so warped society becomes unable to protect children which can only hasten the collapse of society. Punitive justice only seems to work, mainly it relies on people fearing that their harmful actions will be punished, if people believe their actions aren't harmful they will do them and punitive justices' appearance of success disappears. Need I remind you that the game wouldn't exist without exploiting unpaid child labor? I feel I must, because the only comment of 332 pointing it out has low opacity. Is it any wonder that a software platform designed around exploiting children has users engaging in child exploitation?
• scotty79 10mo ago
  > how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff? Very Trump-like
• llamajams 10mo ago
  Im always frustrated by such journalism; "why won't they do something!?" . What is there to do besides, face id , chat controlor, heavy moderation, and if it were done, a whole other crowd wpuld have their pitchforks ready to go.
• cocainemonster 10mo ago
  do y'alls hold governments accountable for the crimes their citizens do?
• port11 10mo ago
  “What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?” Hmm… okay, is it power that turns off your empathy nodes? Money? Were they always unempathetic? This is a genuine concern, because humans are literally wired for empathy with our kin, even if we consider tribal rivalries.