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.
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
I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)
this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.
the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.
the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.
YES! This is a big piece of it. Fewer kids + more of them wanting to be inside / parents wanting them to be inside = less kids to play with = even less likelihood of them wanting to play outside.
This is like social media in reverse: nobody wants to be inside, but some people are only inside, so everybody is inside.
My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.
I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.
Last bit is not quite right: a lot of people want to be inside. That contributes strongly to the feedback loop you rightly identify.
(WHY they want to stay inside is another matter, but I suspect a large part is the stereotypical answer: unending seas of digital content highly optimised to hack the consumer's brain.)
If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still
loved playing it, but valuable perspective.
Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)
This is an easy argument to make, but I don't think it actually applies in any way. Roblox is just as popular in countries where these things have not disappeared.
All the listed countries have low fertility rates, increasing screentime rates, etc.
I suspect if you cornered a parent of a 2yo in any of those countries, they would not say it is meaningfully more social and child-friendly TODAY that the USA is, or Australia (for which I can speak) is.
Sorry for being blunt, isn't this mostly an US phenomen?
Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.
That sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect from tech's responsibility in that matter.
Decades ago, kids might have met in unsafe areas as well: maybe hang out in an abandoned building or whatever. But there wasn't yet a trillion dollar business deliberately creating abandoned buildings to hang out in.
Kids do not want to go outside. Even if parents want it and push for it, youtube, whatsapp, roblox, fortnite, whatever they have from steam is much more fun.
More accurately the kids you're aware of don't want to.
Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.
Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.
Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.
Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.
Kids want to go outside if other kids are outside. We are social animals, and the most addictive games for youth are glorified social networks. It helps if other parents in the area are on the same page.
Yeah I was periodically booted out. My only gripe with it is there were few others around. My closest friend and I mostly played video games in the living room.
While those may or may not be issues, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Child abuse and pedophilia has been a scourge on children since at least Ancient Greek times when it was well documented and I’m sure even longer than that.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
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.
I let my kid play Roblox for a couple of weeks and I was absolutely horrified by all the inducements to seek Robux. So I removed it from her iPad, which is locked down.
I play Roblox with my daughter from time to time and we have lots of fun. I’ve explained the dangers to her (strangers messaging, gambling style games, etc), and I see it as an opportunity to teach her while she still listens to me. When she’s older and I’m not privy to everything she does on a computer I don’t want her stumbling across these things uninformed.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've had a similar approach. My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.
I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
I agree desktops are best, and they are what my kids started with, but there is a lot of pressure to give kids phones.
For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).
There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.
This is such a good approach. You're sharing interests with your daughter and teaching her valuable skills to confront problems she will absolutely face as an adult. Having the good foundation will give her a leg up later in life for sure and I wish more parents followed this example.
To summarize a bit glibly, you're saying to be a good parent. Which of course is awesome, and it is important for people like yourself to explain how to do that using the available tools, etc.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
My son plays Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 on the Playstation sometimes, if all his homework is done and his room is tidyish.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
The PS4 remake is excellent. Sure, the maps have been restyled a bit, but the warehouse looks just as good as you remember, and you remember it as looking a hell of a lot better than it really did.
THPS1 is forever intertwined with having a few pints with my wee sister, pick up a curry and some beer on the way round to hers, then watch The West Wing, then beating her boyfriend at Tony Hawks', drinking beer, and eating curry until the small hours of Sunday morning.
In the early 2000s, we really did have it all, didn't we?
The problem is that just like boycotts/individual action doesn't work (besides a handful of lucky exceptions), this won't work either if all your kids' peers are on it. Being the "odd one out" brings its own share of problems, especially in a volatile environment where any pretext for bullying is a good one.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I agree mostly. But I would push back on the idea that you need to let your child do whatever (play on Roblox, get fancy clothes or toys, etc) because of bullying. You're trading one set of potential problems for another set of known problems, and letting your own fears dictate how you raise your kids. How do you expect your kids to stand up to peer pressure as teenagers if you give into their peers when they are younger?
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
I would be surprised if that were true. Roblox was one of the earliest games to have their digital currency for sale in corner stores where kids can buy it with cash.
There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.
I still let my kid play a couple of hours a week, but told him no robux at all, it just wasn't something we were even going to consider. Let's see how it lasts, hopefully I can get him interested in something else but somehow his entire local social circle collapsed when we made him cut back on his play time. Its not even strangers at this point, but kids at school that have caused conflicts.
Minecraft by itself is benign, but online servers? Oh boy.
Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.
Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.
Not OP, but for me I'm wary whenever I see in-game currency (Minecoins). Thankfully there are no gambling mechanics tied in to Minecoins directly, but the server ecosystem is still rampant with gambling just the same[0].
I agree regarding in-game currency. I find it distasteful. But in my mind, paid mods are a different thing that can exist independently. I don't find those distasteful. I find their existence slightly positive.
For sure. But the unofficial non-paid mods for Bedrock allow for gambling mechanics, so long as it's not linked to real world currency, which I still find problematic for a game marketed towards kids. Link I posted is from years ago claiming that featured servers in Bedrock almost all have gambling, and nothing has changed since then.
Java edition is a lot more wild west and next-to-impossible to enforce their EULA due to the nature of distribution and installation of Java edition mods.
> Any Mods you create for Minecraft: Java Edition from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them
Is that legally enforceable? If a mod doesn't contain code / assets from the game itself, what legal rights does Microsoft have over the distribution of that mod?
Yes courts have found that game mods, even if they don't directly include any content from the original game in their distributable, count as derivative works under copyright.
> The ruling continues to apply to the legal status of video game modding, with mods viewed as derivative works that require the consent of the copyright holder. While this may legally limit the creation of mods, machinima, broadcasts, or even cheats, many game developers have authorized and encouraged some of these activities.
If it's made by randoms, then Microsoft is barely better than a rent-seeking middleman. If it's made by Microsoft, they should just put it in the f-ing game or move on to making something new to get more money.
It feels like monetizing something that used to be free and built by passionate tinkerers for its own sake. It's destroying yet another part of that hacker culture some people so very often reminisce about on this site.
Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.
As far as I know, you can still write free mods outside the mod store to your heart's content, just as you ever could. The existence of paid mods doesn't seem to limit your ability to do that.
I don't really understand why those things are bad? Making your server executable available for dedicated servers is common (and good!) and selling paid mods just seems like selling software to me
edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)
The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.
Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.
I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.
You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.
That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.
There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…
It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error
Microsoft forces login these days for single player play, and jams ads, social networking crap.
As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.
So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?
Exactly, everything wrong with Minecraft started with Microsoft. They took a fun, harmless, and free game so that they could profit from it and they've been working at making it increasingly harmful ever since.
Have you considered not tying your encryption keys to your child's online activities? I can understand the thrill of danger, but I'm not that much of a gambler myself.
I was fine with Minecraft until the kids started wanting to install all kinds of mods, which as far as I know are random executables you download from shady websites.
just another surface for predators to access underage targets. I guess one thing with Minecraft specifically is there’s a veneer of positive / educational content to smuggle that access beneath - schools have lessons that include Minecraft play, you don’t get that with Fortnite or Roblox, so it seems more ‘innocent.’
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
where would creeps even contact kids on Minecraft? the only officially sanctioned servers are on Bedrock and tightly moderated, everything else is plastered with Microsoft-sanctioned warnings about unmoderated play
Agree massive headache. Our kids go to the boys and girls club after school where they were playing roblox during computer time. Some parents apparently complained and it’s now banned. Not sure of that is local or nation-wide. They were kind of annoyed but they seem to understand why. I am definitely worried about giving them the tools they need to navigate the online jungle when they are older.
School (or parents) running local servers for kids in school to play to avoid the whole bunch of dangers of open online would be interesting turn back to gaming roots
What's wrong with Minecraft? I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but am pretty impressed with how little control they have so far exerted over Java Edition, they even made modding easier recently by removing obfuscation. You can run your own server as much as you want with no fees, obligations or anything. And unless the kids know a server address, they can't easily join some third party server with weird stuff going on. Not that I ever heard of one of those, but I'm sure they must exist.
As others have said there's a big difference between the Minecraft "we" (the tech community growing up on Beta versions of Minecraft) know and the Minecraft of today.
The subsequent versions also developed the game mechanics a lot to turn it into something closer to an RPG than the early, bare-bones sandbox game with minimal, well-understood mechanics and the rest purely up to the players' creativity.
There's nowadays an abundance of Pay-to-Win servers with custom mechanics to enable that, and I'm sure a lot of unsavory people preying on children. The social media (YouTube/etc) community around it has exploded too in a way I don't recall it before (I used to be into Minecraft videos back in the ~2012 era, and what I see nowadays grosses me out in comparison).
Java Minecraft (the old version, moddable, self-hostable) and Bedrock Minecraft (windows/console only, no self-hosted servers) are quite different.
The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.
With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
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.
Summer's highest case of kid accidents that ended in hospital in my country were the escooters, parents just buy whatever looks good in ad, not caring to train kid (technically moped license is needed) or even get one that's actually legal (with speed limit).
End result - machine capable of going 50km/h or faster (think they caught one doing 90) in hands of young teen or outright kid. Hell, there was even a trucker that reported getting overtaken by one...
I dug into this statistic for my city recently and found the majority of reported "scooter accidents" were actually occurrences of car drivers crashing into someone on a scooter.
I'd been riding bikes with my friends around the block since the age of 6. Parents didn't chase us around and minded their own business instead of nanomanaging us into absolute snowflakes that modern children have become. We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts, and showed up at home just to check in and have a quick lunch. We did a bunch more things many parents would deem insane these days (and even our own, should they know)...
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom and came into adulthood with a bunch of wonderful warm memories of our childhoods, free of any stigmas or psychological trumas.
This modern fear-based attitude towards childhood is beyond sick.
Now before anyone says "but pedophiles and terrorists" - mind you, that was 80's USSR, Chikatilo had still been at large, the gossip was there but wasn't amplified enough to put everyone into scared trance like modern mass-media does.
Literally nothing has changed in the society since then, maniacs were around just like they are now, but the attitude towards the outside world has been so blown out of proportion today, that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
> that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
There's a lot of blame for parents, much of it deserved. But when you have CPS being called for kids playing in the woods or parents charged with manslaughter when some one else runs over their kid you realize this is now going against the grain to resist this stuff.
It just seems insane to me that this mentality has been allowed to take root. I live in an area where kids on bikes are a regular sight, any time the weather is even halfway decent. Just last year, I came across a brother and sister riding up the forest preserve bike trail with fishing poles. But the media-driven "fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear" narrative has really done a hell of a lot of harm to society.
I always wonder what happened here. I remember hearing about how CPS was chronically underfunded in the 90s and did not even have the resources to investigate every case of serious abuse. But now they have the resources to go after parents that let their 10 year olds walk 2 blocks to a park? Did we start pumping funding into CPS or something? This is like if the cops started ticketing people for jaywalking.
> We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks
As someone who thinks kids should have freedom, like kids in Germany or Japan have, I hate it when ridiculous arguments like these show up.
Look, if you was regularly doing all that, you probably should not have all that freedom. But, most kids are actually more reasonable, if raised right.
What problem with me as I am now would you solve if you had any power to prevent me from being a kid and doing pretty common things kids were doing then?
See, neither me nor any of my friends became terrorist bombers, heck, there is not even a single stuntman around us! On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision. We knew what we did. No amount of nannying will fix kids who lack the touch with the harsh reality, as it takes feeling some pain sometimes to be responsible and not inflict pain on others.
> On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision.
I have no reason to believe that. The issue with 2 out of 3 activities you listed is also the danger or damage to OTHERS and their property. Which you do not even noticed, clocked or cared about. The only thing you care about is you feeling some pain, presumably.
Cool, stop everyone else from being a nanny then. You pull the stuff you and I did as kids in most places now and you'll have the police and CPS show up.
Also nothing says survivor bias as statements like:
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom
It is nonsense to use your own example and imply it was safe, because you are mostly blind to the failure modes of the counterhistorical damaged or dead.
However, I agree with you. Kids raised in dangerous rural areas do learn. I had my fair share of close calls as a child in my city! I feel lucky to have had so much freedom. 30 years later I was told one guy I knew as a child was convicted of pedophilia: I still remember his awesome basement but I don't recall any bad close call with him (perhaps I was ugly : sorry sicko).
We don't notice many dangerous close calls.
Hopefully we learn from from other close calls we did notice... I remember hammering a blank gun cartridge (ramset) until it exploded and thinking I shouldn't do that again. I also did a lot things with fire that I shouldn't have!
till you are with that kid that is a bit too brave and a bit too eager and they do drop in some hole and break a leg or worse. That's what parents are afraid of, they remember some "close" accident in their childhood and want to make their kids not get chance to do a mistake.
Now ideally parents would just keep an eye on them, teach the kids, and maybe even "help" in potentially dangerous-yet-fun-for-kid stuff to make it not dangerous
...but parents now don't want to spend time just like parents back then didn't wanted to spend time and let kids alone to their own devices. Only difference before parents kicked kids outside while now parents give them ipad...
In no way was I a neglected kid. Parents still spent a huge deal of time with me, dad taught me drawing, astronomy, English, played guitar for me, we listened to music together, played games, walked together, printed photos, rode snow slegde downhill in the winter. Me being allowed to spend time outdoors with my friends was perfectly a part of their caring, not an attempt to get rid of me.
This is in stark contrast with the way parents want their children to be near and observed, but separated with black mirrors.
Now, please don't think that I blame every modern parent out there. There are enough good parents around even today. What I talk about are the trends in general.
Unfortunately, I don't see how kids would stick to offline experiences anymore if you just turn them loose in the neighborhood, because one of the other kids will undoubtedly have unfettered internet access, so the kids will likely just end up clustered around their computer or phone.
> made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts
I used to do similar crazy things, had this friend who liked to play a kind of a game of chicken with an M-80, see who will hold on to it the longest. He would've been 45 years old today. /s
My elder brother would've been 47 this year should he not die aged 2 of sudden acute disease that doctors of that day and place couldn't stop. What's your point?
That "things were better in the old days, all this safety culture is pointless" overlooks the tragedies we became inured to back in those days?
I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
If the all class plays Fortnite and that is the only way they get socialized, his parents should consider moving him to another school. Many kids don't play this kind of stuff and actually prefer hanging out.
This kind of approach is also invalid. So what everyone plays Fortnite? There are many places to get socialized with other kids. The kid likes basketball? Sign him up to a basketball team; he likes to play music? Sign him to some band; etc. Kids shouldn't surrender to peer pressure.
I agree schools are also a problem, but not the main problem.
Yes, it's quite easy to change to the school with the "correctly"-behaved children in the USA. It won't solve any of the other structural issues that grade-separation causes, but at least this one has an easy answer!
Has an authority ever forbid you to do something and you still did it?
If so, was it a problem that you didn't listen?
I'm not a parent, but fortnite is not like smoking or drugs, common. If you don't let kids grow over this kind of bad content, they will never become good discriminators.
If they grow on it they will normalize this bad content. If someone didn't grow on Fortnite and then hear somebody wastes 6h a day on Fortnite, they will think "this guy is nuts".
Everybody consumes bad content when they are a child, and everybody grows over it, becoming bored of it, and then looking for something better to do.
What show did you like when you were a kid? Do you still like it? Are you eager to consume it in the same amount as you did? If not, it means you grew over it.
When I was a child I loved the Monkey Island series, completing them several times a year. Solving the puzzles made feel smart, and the jokes made me chuckle. But now? I could hardly complete the high-res remakes or even the latest title. The puzzles are either too simple or just nonsensical try-and-error, I find the story boring and shallow (compared to other content I consume now), and none of the jokes really hit the spot anymore.
I think forbidding kids to access content they crave is wrong and cruel, as you are basically forbidding them from exploring their tastes, forbidding them from becoming interesting adults with refined and deep tastes.
Even in the case of alcohol, I think people should explore it and their limits (getting wasted) when they are young. I have an aunt who never tried alcohol until she was in her 40s, and she went through the same phases as teenagers; however, at that age getting too drunk too often has serious social consequences. She spiraled out of control, becoming alcoholic, and then later addicted to other drugs. I am not a psychology expert, but I always thought that her problem was that she was too old to explore this path.
In my country we have an idiom I like: "potro que no galopa, de caballo se desboca", which means "colts that don't gallop become wild horses".
People are downvoting this but it's the correct response. I will never worry about Roblox because my child will never be able to play it at home. Problem solved. I understand that maybe non-technical people might not know to think about these things, but in this crowd this response should be the most upvoted. These things are poinsons. Don't feed your children poison. It's pretty simple. "They'll be left out!" Good! While other children consume poison my child will be left out from consuming poison.
I'm happy parents like you exist. I was growing up in the time it started being acceptable to give 10 year olds smartphones, and I desperately wanted one. My parents didn't get me one (mostly because we were broke). I eventually got one and while I will sing the praises of letting kids access the internet with less guardrails, the instant always connected access to the internet did a number to my mental health and I eventually switched to a dumbphone.
Same. I read his other replies, he definitely comes off as somebody who does not have experience with the complexities of raising children in today's world.
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.
Isn’t this just called “having a discord server” or even a group text? If you only want to talk with people you know outside the game, you don’t need the game to facilitate that.
most of the Roblox predation is occurring on Discord, so not a solution
(and actually explains why the CEO this article is about feels like its not his problem, because as long as people keep pointing fingers in the wrong direction for our legal system, then the CEO and Roblox corporation will be impervious and their efforts seen as sufficient)
This would be trivial to implement well. Give the parents a console where they can paste in usernames. Most classes already have parents whatsapp groups or similar, so it’s easy enough to broadcast the usernames, or create a shared google doc.
Console access could also be required to create new accounts. The article says it is currently trivial for kids to just create an adult account and bypass all the parental controls.
Nintendo kind of tried that with "friend codes" but they were just annoying and spread online anyway, which is kind of fair since today it's not uncommon for people to be friends with people in distant places and the internet should allow us to be able to connect and play with each other no matter where we are.
The original solution to just playing with local friends was LAN parties, but private servers were great too where they were actually private/hosted entirely by the players and not just part of some corporation's online platform.
Fwiw this is why I was thinking of a hardware solution, with some sort of hardware code shared via Bluetooth you could make it so it can't be shared online.
It doesn't even have to be super cryptographically secured against someone getting their own code off of it, since that's probably beyond most children.
You would want to make sure that people can't just sniff them or something though.
I think it's very technically possible with a lil bit of cooperation from industry: Private servers that use school creds to login. Now:
* kids play with other kids with same school, worst that can happen is learning some fun words from upper classmate
* both teacher and parents can join and play or keep an eye on them
* with a bit more it could be segregated to per class /grade server too
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.
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.
> That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.
That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).
It was fucking great.
And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option
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.
I'd say TFA and thread are both talking about this. Quoting the article-
> Understanding how attractive Roblox would be to predators, the company long ago could have blocked unrestricted contact between adults and minors.
Contact here seems to be about DMs or equivalent, since I don't think grooming and kidnapping preparations are happening in public forums? So with or without involvement of a physical key-exchange, I'd say that curbing private personal contact is the crux, and it's easily doable without effecting other aspects of the game
hell, the argument that it's needed to allow users to collaborate is dumb. Just have a list of specified phrases and severely limit other forms of communications, we figured this out with club penguin people it's not that hard
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.
One possibility: hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children or connects them with predators, and let them figure out how they'd like to avoid that liability. Could be through building something more robust (e.g. only allowing kids to play with pre-whitelisted friends, not any anonymous user), or hiring a legion of moderators, or through not building such a platform at all. That's up to them.
We don't need to prescribe what they ought to do. It's sufficient to say what we have here is unacceptable and make fixing it be a them problem.
This !! 100% Match the relation between power/control with reliability/consequences, instead of damning us all to ID for every Internet use (and that is coming) and so immensely risk that we get access to critical information and/or face increasing censorship. That would require a change of perception, but it would solve so many problems, from the one discussed here with Roblox as an example to food contaminated with whatever to appliances quality.
"hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children"
If that didn't happen with pornography websites in the 90s/2000s it's probably not happening now.
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.
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.
> 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
Am I the only one who was really underwhelmed? I saw that it was supposedly a very tense trainwreck situation and sure, it gets sarcastic and stuff, but most of it was
Interviewer: "so I heard you were/are doing a bad job with moderation"
CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time
Repeat.
I mean, at no point did the CEO say anything interesting about the moderation problem or what they are doing. The interviewers seem too skeptical to be genuinely interested. He explains to them that cost =/= quality and that 2016 =/= 2025 for what feels like an eternity. I was bored.
So historically, when someone accepted an interview yet refused to engage with any questions, or stay on topic, AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation.. it was considered unhinged and obviously crazy behavior.
If interviewee acts clueless, drawling, or drooling then they could be pretty uncooperative and mostly get a pass because it's not very polite to point out stupidity. But for the big bonus crazy-points though, interviewee may opt in to escalation, becoming unabashedly and almost childishly combative, talking over each other, etc. Obviously all of these tactics are pretty normalized now though.
> I was bored.
This is basically the goal. After the interviewee realizes the interviewer is hostile, they just double down on their talking points to signal to investors and ignore the intended audience of the interviewer. Mistake on the interviewers part honestly to publish it at that point IMO.
Well said, my reaction was basically, what he is saying is not really for a listener like me.
> AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation..
I agree this is a big part of it and would add that the "unhinged" look is probably just a lack of PR skill. Both sides are hostile but the interviewers "win" here by staying within the rules of the game, and they also do a beautiful job of sort of winking at the audience like "wow this dude is crazy right?"
It's impressive but sorta annoying, I'd rather listen to actual content.
Yeah that was a little cringe. Once he starts laying out on the sarcasm thick you tell he's pissed. He runs one of the biggest games out there and the audience is majority children and they have been in the news a lot for not doing enough to protect their kids that play their game.
I'm more shocked he's been around in the industry for 20 years and still hasn't learned media discipline. All he had to do was be a little empathetic and explain how they were doing everything they can do keep kids safe. Would have just been another run of the mill CEO interview.
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.
Tbh making Roblox illegal feels like the same moral panic that our parents had around metal music, hip-hop, and arcades.
My kid plays Roblox, I prevent her from talking to others, and I police the Robux purchases. It really is a fun platform. The problem is for parents that aren't technical, or are negligent and don't know how to police it.
- You cannot prevent your child to login and play at least 15mn (without manually resetting the password in the kid account)
- combine this with the fact you cannot prevent changing the password reset email on the child account, and in practice you cannot prevent your child from using roblox
- You cannot prevent gift card to be used
- There's no way to trace gift cards usage at all
- Roblox will remove controls at some ages without warning you
- Deleting your kid account is a fight (it's been two weeks and roblox is asking me proof of ownership I cannot give since they don't exist)
- You cannot prevent fear of missing out
- You cannot control pay to win games
- You cannot prevent your child face to be scanned and shared for "age control"
- Same for your own face
- Probably more...
Oh and don't forget there's absolutely no way to prevent your kid to have multiple accounts, and have a parallel life you know nothing about.
You cannot prevent someone from robbing and killing you either. That doesn't mean the law has no value. It sets a standard for conduct and creates a psychological expectation. If violated, it enables punishment.
I mean to a degree this is true of any kid who is that determined to go against their parents’ wishes. You can’t prevent a kid from making friends with the bad kids while at school, you can’t prevent a kid from playing the asphyxiation game, you can’t prevent a kid from sniffing solvents (they’re everywhere). At some point you just have to do your best and hope things turn out ok.
I think parents (not fully unfoundedly) expect more of a playground experience from something advertised as a "game for children", so for them it follows that they should precisely not have to manually police it.
> Tbh making Roblox illegal feels like the same moral panic that our parents had around metal music, hip-hop, and arcades.
I feel like this argument has become a cliche in itself. Sometimes things are worth panicking about, and limiting access to things like cigarettes or gambling for children has been a real benefit to society. The same could be true for the dark patterns listed above.
It goes beyond that though. There are games and in-game content that aren't being reviewed. There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).
Anyone can make a Roblox game and publish it, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of moderations or verification going on. And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways.
> And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways
I had blocked chat on my kid's account and thought I was ok. Then I see her playing one game and ask her what she's doing. She says she's updating her character status (description etc) to talk to other players.
> There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).
Gambling and facilitating sexual predation is probably worth regulating, but I don't find tasteless jokes a sufficient cause for intervention.
Nor is this even a remotely new phenomenon. I was on Newgrounds as a pre-teenager when people were making wacky flash games about school shootings and 9/11.
That is where content rating should come in, and games should be reviewed by Roblox staff before being approved. Then, Roblox age restrictions could play a role in keeping a 7-year old from a seeing photos of a murder.
Apparently, for all the "free speech requires us all to tolerate nazi" logic I hear here all the the time, a mere rumor of maybe someone being jerk toward fascist is enough to go all the other way.
Roblox do actually takes down violent content, in reality. But that is never the important part.
Honestly the voice comms have been a nice upgrade and I find I mind it a lot less than text. It's a lot easier to confirm the person on the other side is not some middle aged creep. It's also a lot more ergonomic for talking with friends (though they already tend to use facetime calls in the background)
I used to work at the local after school club a few years ago and we had to have several interventions when the 8-10 year old girls were talking about the grown men they were talking to through Roblox.
The grooming going on there is a real problem. At least more awareness for parents would be a good thing.
I mean, gambling for underage children is already illegal due to a myriad of reasons. I'd argue the psychological design of gacha games should be limited. Building patterns that get adults addicted, and advertising them specifically to children is the problem.
In the same way if a casino advertised child roulette wheels, I'd want legislation to step in.
I would not be against banning sale of any type of mystery or lootbox mechanics to those under age of 18. Including all digital and physical products. Yes, some things will be lost, but I think it will be for better.
It’s tough to put into law because this could easily cover innocuous things like gas station gashapon machines, school raffles, and Pokemon cards. Most people aren’t going to support a ban on those. And when you try to try to target the law too narrowly, you can run into problems with loopholes or legal precedent that prevents discriminatory and targeted legislation (there is precedent around equal protection).
I do think people should push for voluntary limits on gacha mechanics, because they are awful when overused and are probably harmful for a small percentage of the population that’s prone to gambling. Steam would probably be fine with rating/age gating games that heavily rely on these mechanics, the hard part is getting Google and Apple on board. Micropayments from “whales” (high spenders) provide a lot of revenue for them.
I’m also not entirely sure that gacha mechanics alone are that bad, it’s when you combine them with currency (virtual or real) that it becomes a huge problem. Absent currency it’s usually a self-limiting problem, because overuse of the mechanic makes the game worse.
Looking at many of these markets when you get to older demographics that have capital they start to look lot less innocuous. The amount of money and rampant speculation with random toy boxes and card games is something I question as much as actual gambling. There is lot that needs to be done to change general public opinion on this. At least when kids are involved.
I think in general movement to direction where you know exactly what you will get is significantly more healthy. There will still be lot of people who cannot control their spending. But removing the chase sounds desirable to me.
I try to comment on Roblox whenever it comes up as my daughter was pulled into a grooming pedo gang through Roblox.
Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.
I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.
> 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.
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.
They created the system that allows it. StarCraft had user generated content, but no real gambling because the games ended within an hour or so, and no state was kept.
If they want to create a platform for children gambling and facilitate the payments, yes let's figure out how to send them to prison. They're not stupid. They know all of the reasons why they have a $60B market cap. That's 2/3 of Nintendo for making a "free" game.
Right, but it's also the responsibility of Roblox to moderate and avoid those things from happening, especially when their product is both aimed primarily at children with a userbase of mostly children
I mean, if someone was on a street corner selling child friendly cigarettes, I wouldn't call that a parenting issue.
I think parenting is one aspect, but surely you see how given it's a platform that advertises itself specifically for children, in the same way as if there was a children channel on the TV telling your kids to smoke crack, maybe someone should step in
Yea, we'd charge the person on the corner selling the cigarettes. We wouldn't sue the city for selling cigarettes just because it happened in the city, even if the person selling them paid their taxes (so the city made money on it).
As a society, we limit children's access to predatory stuff all the time - porn, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling/lottery, guns, even swear words on the public airwaves.
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.
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.
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.
It's definitely this. I live in one of the safest cities in the country, in the Midwest. The other day on some local Facebook group, I saw a mom trying to find someone to pick up her kids from middle school and elementary school every day. It was a 10 and 5 minute walk respectively that EVERYONE in that neighborhood took 30 years ago. No busy streets, nothing. Sidewalks and everything. Absolutely insane.
I also live in an incredibly safe area and had a friend from outside the US say it is like a horror movie after walking around a few times on a beautiful summer night when they visited.
Perfect summer night and there is not a person to be seen. They felt like they were walking around in some kind of zombie horror movie that all the people had vanished.
It's hard to tell. You have to wait a generation or two to see the long term effects, as people will still have their earlier social habits.
It feels as though people slowly learned that they could get away with not introducing themselves to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner, and other activities that were once assumed.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The problem is the Roblox games have exclusive timed events that give the children FOMO. So much that they have breakdowns and refuse to do their normally scheduled activities. And it changes their behavior.
Any social games have this. I wasn’t an Everquest or WoW player, but I knew some, and scheduled raids with friends were a common thing. Minecraft servers hold events, etc.
You probably bought or pirated the games you played at the LAN party, maybe once and some DLC. You probably played with at least a few people you knew and the games had a goal - capture the flag or the bases or something - that often you had to work with a team to accomplish.
Roblox is designed from the ground up to sell Robux. Not to promote fun games or anything interesting in the least.
The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
The events have also caused massive arguments and begging and pleading at my house since Roblox is rarely allowed (and would never be allowed if I had my way...)
> The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
There’s at least two whole genre of games like this: idle games, and the more aggressive gacha games (which more often let you pay to win). I guess the differentiator with Roblox is the social aspect.
I do think pay to win is a problem, FWIW.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Those games are pointless too though? As are nearly all games.
There’s legitimate criticisms of Roblox moderation and the business model. But games are games, and I feel like criticism of some Roblox-specific issues are getting entangled with normal gaming behavior. I get that you may not love to see kids who ignore you when they’re engrossed in a game, but that’s just how games are. Limit game time if it’s a problem, and/or make them earn their own money for pay-to-win junk. You’re the parent.
These arguments are nuts. The kids I know play roblox games ... honestly because they like the games. That is really really it. I am very confident they are not earning rare robux on it, because I know what they play.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Frankly, Doom was pointless for christ sake, as pointless as it gets. And yes, obviously a game appealing to 8-12 years old is pointless to a teenager or adult. No, kids wont play the grandpa games. And yes, they do not want to play only games adults deemed educational or training whatever you think counter strike trains enough. They play them literally because they find those games fun.
If you think DOOM and CS aren't brain rot, you might be just falling into nostalgia. Shooting demons and other players and spraying bloody gibs is absolute brain rot.
I play Roblox with my 9 year old, and no, they're not anymore brain rot than DOOM or Quake deathmatches were. Capture the flag or tower defense was almost never the point. It was being first in a deathmatch.
Quite frankly today's Roblox games tend to be a lot more enlightening, innovative and entertaining. Not all of course but many.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Still, I don’t see too much in modern gaming that’s different from what we had as kids. The gacha/gambling mechanics are overused and this might be detrimental. But I definitely spent days glued to the screen back in the day even without that stuff.
(The moderation problems in the article are clearly a new and separate issue that needs to be dealt with.)
I bet adult tennis instructors get a lot of cancellations on Super Bowl Sunday. In certain circles, you're going to have a hard time scheduling a screen-free dinner party on Oscar night, or opposite the finale of a hit TV show.
Isn't it obvious that you mention discrete events when, now, depending on the number of apps and online presence there is a virtually continuous set of events?
This feels like an incredibly normal thing though? Kids oftentimes want to do things that are highly stimulating and "fun" in substitute for things that are more rewarding, often to the point of obstinance.
And I don't want to defend Roblox, their laissez faire attitude towards predators abusing their platform is abhorrent and disgusting. But this anecdote is about as old as civilization.
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".
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
A correctly manufactured chainsaw can be used safely by adults. Products like "MoonSoll and Magic Chems Fuel Bottles" [1], "Tesla Powerwall 2 AC Battery Power Systems" [2] and literally tens of thousands of other products listed at [3] have been determined that they can not be used safely by adults, and are literally taken off store shelves until the issues can be resolved. It is a normal, everyday occurrence that manufacturers are very motivated to not sell products that cannot be used safely, Hacker-Newsesque semantic nitpicking notwithstanding. If similar liabilities applied to software like Roblox (think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"), there would not be a Roblox without effective moderation.
The first example is a labeling and packaging issue, the second is a malfunctioning product. There are plenty of fuel oil bottles available on the market and other much sketchier (though not obviously malfunctioning) batteries that haven’t been pulled. The available alternatives are still dangerous and potentially flammable, they just don’t meet the criteria set for shipping, storing, and normal usage.
Chainsaws can be used somewhat safely, but they are never totally safe. Chainsaws are inherently dangerous. But if a broken chainsaw that always cuts off your arm makes it to market, yes it will be pulled whether it’s a recall or a lawsuit.
> think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"
Psychological harm is notoriously difficult to measure (was it really Roblox or was it bullying?) and is a political football. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to open that box for a multitude of reasons. (For one thing every website on the internet would immediately face a mountain of lawsuits.)
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.
> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.
This sounds good as a sound bite. But barely any investigation cracks it. We don't police companies much because we have entire divisions of law enforcement who are supposed to be doing that job.
1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.
2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.
etc etc.
I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.
1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.
2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.
3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.
4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.
The one catch here is that there are limited legal avenues, and your solution requires a robust legal system and laws which is what we don’t have. At the moment over -worked police departments have to play wack a mole going after every single perpetrator, and they also can’t see everything happening on these systems to police it.
As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.
So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)
> I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.
I've come to the belief that there is a larger than we assume portion of the population that is either complicit in these things, or doesn't think that these types of behaviors are "that bad". (some of the comments here are, sadly, exactly that) It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of why these things are so hard to root out. Some of these people perhaps never had children, which might be part of the disconnect. But if I was the CEO of a company harming children in this way, I'd make it my life mission to stamp it out and find and prosecute the individuals involved.
What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ah great question, I wondered this myself as there was no phone involved here (in our household) and Instagram has been banned on my network for many years. It was from a friend's phone at school and that same friend later provided my child with an old galaxy tab to bring home, which was cleverly hidden under the carpet beneath the bed with wifi access to our neighbor's internet (provided by neighbor's kid as well). It's amazing the lengths they'll go through to circumvent rules.
EDIT: and if you're wondering where the initial exposure to Roblox came from, it was from an Android tablet I had at the time which was setup strictly for kids games (hence the FamilyLink with time limits and stuff)
> 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 don't want to kick you when you're down, but you tried a technical solution on a human problem.
I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Can you elaborate on what a "human" solution would be in your mind? For us, it was a combination of technical, educational, and traditional parenting as well as some therapy for other behavioral issues exhibited in school. We had after-school classes and sports. We played board games as a family. From our perspective, we were doing things correctly in both the technical and human aspect of it to make sure it never got to that point, yet it still happened.
It could of course be simply down to the fact that all children are different, but what worked for us is honesty and the closeness that brought.
I've see parents "talk" with their children, where it seemed more like they were talking _at_ them. I could see in the kids face he was putting on a show of listening (and pretending to go along with it), because that was the fastest track to going back to doing whatever he liked when they weren't watching.
Where it worked though, was getting closer to my children by admitting where I was at and where I was coming from. When they feel like you're really connecting with them.
I'm sure my kids still get up to much I'll (hopefully) never hear about, but that's normal. As long as the big overarching stuff is understood, I'll take that as a win.
Given what this person has gone through, if you want to be critical then I think you owe us a more detailed explanation what exactly would have worked better. Armchair parenting is very easy.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed to actual child sexual abuse being allowed on an online platform?
One of the comments above has a video of a guy arrested and admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.. that doesn’t sound like just some sort of over exaggerated panic.
> 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.
It wasn’t immediate obvious when those were occurring only years later.. so most likely we are seeing the tip of the iceberg.
> You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed
People were definitely harmed, psychically, and physically - straight up to torture in 'conversion therapies' and death, over the D&D (and related RPG) hysteria.
> admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.
Have you ever played online games? "Contacting several kids a day" is how internet chat works. I'm sure if it was up to you kids would only be able to play single player games and stay inside, god forbid they get struck by lightning or eaten by a polar bear.
What do you want gaming to do? Have a checkbox where you swear you're not a pedophile or something? That's on-par for most of these idiotic suggestions of how people seem to fucking think the internet and gaming works, and what sort of actual solution is viable.
Roblox tracks all the chat and hands it over to law enforcement and NCMEC. They restrict chat for . They give ample parental controls to limit chat/friends/interactions. Now they're adding AI-powered age validation (which I think is a terrible idea) just to appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk, nor apparently have the ability to teach your kids "hey maybe don't talk to creepy strangers who want you to send them images and give them your home address?"
Maybe watch the video. He wasn’t just chatting with them he was sexually abusing them online. He was using Roblox because they made it easy for him. Watch the video.
Your hand waving away is the type of behavior that is complicit in allowing this type of abuse to continue.
And this isn’t just about parents. In one breath you’ll complain about helicopter parents and the next you’ll say it’s the parent’s responsibility to prevent it. The callousness to the suffering of children is disgusting. That’s not just “how the internet works”
This is about not allowing companies to cultivate online spaces specifically enabling this behavior because it makes them money. Your comments indicate you either condone the behavior or work for Roblox or a company like it.
> appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk
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.
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
> HN is heavily biased towards silencing any content that
... violates the guidelines, in particular:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
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?
Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.
My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.
I left this [1] comment a few weeks ago, and I already knew people like you would have dogged on GP for giving their child this level of access and autonomy, just like I knew the HN thread from the other day about homeschooling was going to dog on people who allow their child to go to public school - because teaching children self-sufficiency, self-assurance, and confidence to deal with bad influences is a relic of a time gone by.
Parents would rather justify to themselves the act of building, end-to-end, what their child is exposed to and around - even when that's not how the world works, rather than building a child that knows how to handle themselves when exposed to, and around, anything - because that's ACTUALLY how adult life works.
There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety; but it's still a lot more fruitful than just hand-picking a child's exposure to any and all things during their most formative years - when they're SUPPOSED to be learning how to deal with exposure to as many things as possible, good and bad for them.
The linked comment seems to imply that you have no kids of your own, and generally identify with a child still. That's fine, but not a good look for this kind of conversation.
Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical. That exposure does not build agency, it does the opposite. You cannot expect a child to be able to resist the combined effort of a multi-trillion dollar industry toward building maximally addictive things.
Glad we sorted that out. Barring that, I am not interested in what things you find to be a "good/bad look" for my participation in this conversation.
>"Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical."
They should not. And luckily for you, for at least 2/3 things you said, neither do adults. We've already established a baseline belief as a society that those (legally) require permissive access from subject matter experts, so I don't see your point. My originating comment - or the one I linked - certainly doesn't advocate for minors to have more permissive access to those (or any) industries than an adult?
For your comments onwards, you could have saved yourself a lot of time in your reply by acknowledging what I said in GP:
>"There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety;"
You are right that exposure does not build agency alone - but I never claimed such; access to guidance and mentorship builds better decision-making and problem-solving for a child, and letting them practice agency and autonomy in their own lives allows them to see real-world use cases and applicability of those decision-making and problem-solving skills.
It's how parenting worked before this newest helicopter-lite style of parenting emerged, which seeks to declare as many hardships, trials and tribulations in life as a boogeyman in which a child CANNOT interact with, and pressures parents to coddle their child and build a zero-problem world around them - when that's not how the real world works. In doing so, a parent does not equip their child with the tools to appropriately carry themselves in a sometimes inappropriate world.
I read your "People like you" comment and got angrier and nastier than I should have. I apologize.
I will not continue this discussion. You're arguing against things I don't represent, and have assigned a lot of opinions to me after reading a one-sentence comment.
I appreciate the apology, and I want to apologize if "people like you" came off as prickly. I genuinely didn't mean *you* as a person, but rather "someone like you" as an entity that took an action I had expected to see; I knew that someone was going to leave a one-liner criticizing GP's choice to give their child a certain level of digital autonomy, and advocated for GP on their behalf. I should have said "someone" rather than "people like you".
That said, "arguing against things I don't represent" is generally how debates and newfound perspectives go, and I wish we could have continued. I certainly don't think I assigned any opinions to you, let me know if I'm amiss.
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.
I think your comparison is more apt than you think but not for the reason you say it is. The Internet of today is like the Las Vegas of today—a largely sterile corporate theme park whose only real goal is just separating you from your money and is ruthlessly efficient at it.
I can at least understand being aware of what your kid is doing, but the number of people who say they just ban X outright in there house I'm afraid are gonna be shocked by their kid's actions when they leave the house. Better to teach them when they're young then to all of a sudden have them exposed to everything when they're an older teenager/18.
And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.
I find it weird that you are not DV since the stuff you list here has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people _and_ things have gotten much much worse. The internet is so much more prevalent than it was 15 years ago. The danger is much higher.
The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.
Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.
Both things can be true; there can be both a moral panic about the exaggerated harms of unrestricted internet access, but also as the internet became commonplace and law enforcement not keeping up, it's plausible and likely there are many more predators on it now than it was back in our days.
Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.
My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).
When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").
My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.
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.
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.
I grew up on the unrestricted internet, it doesn't mean I believe it was entirely good. I did (and DO!) many things that I realize are not beneficial, and do not want my children doing.
The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'
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.
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.
It's hyper individualism that is fueling this type of capitalism, the notion that you owe nothing to anyone and other people in society are not your concern, society itself is not your concern, it’s only about what you want etc.
It's like a pond, if you follow hyper individualism, you will extract as many fish from the pond as you can, without caring what happens next or others using the pond, and the fish will not be able to reproduce for future generations, others will not be able to get as many fish as they need etc.
It needs to be balanced. As you say, there is something in between that can work, we do not need to choose only between extremes.
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 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.
I don't really think that culture has existed lately, it kind of died out with the 2008 financial crisis. Now it's about naked use of power, whether political or economic.
The problem with constraints on individual freedom (which is essentially what happens when you constrain capitalism) is that no one agrees on what they should be, and therefore a segment of society will not be happy with them, and claim them as tyrannical oppression. Sometimes this is hysterical nonsense, sometimes it has a point.
Ultimately the antidote to unfettered capitalism is sensible policy crafted through political compromise. But largely Western politics itself has skewed towards extremes lately, few have the patience or understanding for this process, they want a quick fix.
The crony capitalism was brought to you literally by companies and millionaires scared of regulation and heavily pushing for deregulation. They supported Trump and republicans by large margin, especially financially.
If you think only one of the two parties of capital are to blame for this timeline, I have a bridge to sell you.
Democrats manufactured consent for Trump's rise in a 1000 ways over decades. Neoliberalism delivered us Trump, who is merely a symptom of this broken system.
Dems/Repubs play good cop/bad cop; always in service to capital interests. We have a uniparty, but people are fooled by reasonable election turnout and close elections. Democracy is an illusion in the US.
Yeah, you know what, the culpability of republicans is so much higher at this point, that yeah, they are the primary responsible for current state.
This both sides game is just how they were enabled again and again by people who like to frame themselves as reasonable above the politics center, but are in fact just their supporters.
We need to stop painting with the wide brush of "capitalism" like this.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
I don't think any actual socialist would ever argue for an oppressive Soviet state either. They'd want stuff like public firefighters, health care, sewage, roads, etc.
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.
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.
A colleague of mine had the idea that an easy solution for a lot of social media content issues would be any content given by an algorithm is exempt from safe harbor laws. You pick what users see? You’re responsible and liable.
> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.
That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
None of those platforms are for gambling.
I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)
this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.
the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.
the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.
> and devoid of children
YES! This is a big piece of it. Fewer kids + more of them wanting to be inside / parents wanting them to be inside = less kids to play with = even less likelihood of them wanting to play outside.
This is like social media in reverse: nobody wants to be inside, but some people are only inside, so everybody is inside.
My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.
I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.
Last bit is not quite right: a lot of people want to be inside. That contributes strongly to the feedback loop you rightly identify.
(WHY they want to stay inside is another matter, but I suspect a large part is the stereotypical answer: unending seas of digital content highly optimised to hack the consumer's brain.)
It's a parental thing.
I have children, they have friends. None of them have asked for Robux as a gift.
They play the free games together, chatting after school (and homework!) and stop if they hit a payment limit.
Kids can't be trapped by "dark patterns" into paying, they don't have credit cards or money to spend. It's always the parents who give in.
It's both disappearing opportunities for physical play AND addictive platforms
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.
As if arcade games weren’t money hungry and painfully punishing purely to get more quarters out of children.
Arcades got you out of the house, they had a communal aspect to them, you played games together. Those quarters were well spent!
I couldn't get a quarter out of my dad as a kid. Who's fault is the parents?
If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still loved playing it, but valuable perspective.
Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)
This is an easy argument to make, but I don't think it actually applies in any way. Roblox is just as popular in countries where these things have not disappeared.
What countries do you have in mind?
Germany, Japan, France, basically majority of Europe.
Oh dear
All the listed countries have low fertility rates, increasing screentime rates, etc.
I suspect if you cornered a parent of a 2yo in any of those countries, they would not say it is meaningfully more social and child-friendly TODAY that the USA is, or Australia (for which I can speak) is.
sweden
Sorry for being blunt, isn't this mostly an US phenomen?
Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.
I live in Europe and I rarely see kids or teenagers outside.
Me as well, maybe travel a bit around.
Note the sibling comments asserting the same as I am.
That sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect from tech's responsibility in that matter.
Decades ago, kids might have met in unsafe areas as well: maybe hang out in an abandoned building or whatever. But there wasn't yet a trillion dollar business deliberately creating abandoned buildings to hang out in.
This comment feels like a reference to the recently posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945114
Kids do not want to go outside. Even if parents want it and push for it, youtube, whatsapp, roblox, fortnite, whatever they have from steam is much more fun.
More accurately the kids you're aware of don't want to.
Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.
Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.
Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.
Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.
To be fair, we've sort f made outside really, really shitty.
Stroads and parking lots galore ain't all that appealing (or safe) to play in.
Kids want to go outside if other kids are outside. We are social animals, and the most addictive games for youth are glorified social networks. It helps if other parents in the area are on the same page.
Kids never want to go outside. My parents locked me out until dinner. Worked fine.
Yeah I was periodically booted out. My only gripe with it is there were few others around. My closest friend and I mostly played video games in the living room.
[dead]
While those may or may not be issues, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Child abuse and pedophilia has been a scourge on children since at least Ancient Greek times when it was well documented and I’m sure even longer than that.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
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.
I let my kid play Roblox for a couple of weeks and I was absolutely horrified by all the inducements to seek Robux. So I removed it from her iPad, which is locked down.
She gets along just fine without Roblox.
I play Roblox with my daughter from time to time and we have lots of fun. I’ve explained the dangers to her (strangers messaging, gambling style games, etc), and I see it as an opportunity to teach her while she still listens to me. When she’s older and I’m not privy to everything she does on a computer I don’t want her stumbling across these things uninformed.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've had a similar approach. My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
> My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.
laptops and phones mage that a lot harder.
They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.
I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
I agree desktops are best, and they are what my kids started with, but there is a lot of pressure to give kids phones.
For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).
There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.
>bus tickets require an app
this stuff seems criminal to me...and outright bigotry against poor people.
This is such a good approach. You're sharing interests with your daughter and teaching her valuable skills to confront problems she will absolutely face as an adult. Having the good foundation will give her a leg up later in life for sure and I wish more parents followed this example.
To summarize a bit glibly, you're saying to be a good parent. Which of course is awesome, and it is important for people like yourself to explain how to do that using the available tools, etc.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
My son plays Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 on the Playstation sometimes, if all his homework is done and his room is tidyish.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
Man... Pro skater 2. That game's soundtrack/playlist is forever burned into my memories.
The PS4 remake is excellent. Sure, the maps have been restyled a bit, but the warehouse looks just as good as you remember, and you remember it as looking a hell of a lot better than it really did.
THPS1 is forever intertwined with having a few pints with my wee sister, pick up a curry and some beer on the way round to hers, then watch The West Wing, then beating her boyfriend at Tony Hawks', drinking beer, and eating curry until the small hours of Sunday morning.
In the early 2000s, we really did have it all, didn't we?
The problem is that just like boycotts/individual action doesn't work (besides a handful of lucky exceptions), this won't work either if all your kids' peers are on it. Being the "odd one out" brings its own share of problems, especially in a volatile environment where any pretext for bullying is a good one.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I agree mostly. But I would push back on the idea that you need to let your child do whatever (play on Roblox, get fancy clothes or toys, etc) because of bullying. You're trading one set of potential problems for another set of known problems, and letting your own fears dictate how you raise your kids. How do you expect your kids to stand up to peer pressure as teenagers if you give into their peers when they are younger?
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
Roblox is popular precisely because majority of kids play it for free without buying Robux.
I would be surprised if that were true. Roblox was one of the earliest games to have their digital currency for sale in corner stores where kids can buy it with cash.
nothing is free… :)
There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.
I still let my kid play a couple of hours a week, but told him no robux at all, it just wasn't something we were even going to consider. Let's see how it lasts, hopefully I can get him interested in something else but somehow his entire local social circle collapsed when we made him cut back on his play time. Its not even strangers at this point, but kids at school that have caused conflicts.
Whats wrong with Minecraft, that seems like an odd inclusion in the list?
Minecraft by itself is benign, but online servers? Oh boy.
Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.
Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.
> And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by...
You mean Microsoft.
What's wrong with paid mods?
Not OP, but for me I'm wary whenever I see in-game currency (Minecoins). Thankfully there are no gambling mechanics tied in to Minecoins directly, but the server ecosystem is still rampant with gambling just the same[0].
[0] https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...
I agree regarding in-game currency. I find it distasteful. But in my mind, paid mods are a different thing that can exist independently. I don't find those distasteful. I find their existence slightly positive.
For sure. But the unofficial non-paid mods for Bedrock allow for gambling mechanics, so long as it's not linked to real world currency, which I still find problematic for a game marketed towards kids. Link I posted is from years ago claiming that featured servers in Bedrock almost all have gambling, and nothing has changed since then.
Java edition is a lot more wild west and next-to-impossible to enforce their EULA due to the nature of distribution and installation of Java edition mods.
> Any Mods you create for Minecraft: Java Edition from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/eula
Is that legally enforceable? If a mod doesn't contain code / assets from the game itself, what legal rights does Microsoft have over the distribution of that mod?
Yes courts have found that game mods, even if they don't directly include any content from the original game in their distributable, count as derivative works under copyright.
> The ruling continues to apply to the legal status of video game modding, with mods viewed as derivative works that require the consent of the copyright holder. While this may legally limit the creation of mods, machinima, broadcasts, or even cheats, many game developers have authorized and encouraged some of these activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v%2E_FormGen_Inc%2E
It's copyright infringement by being a derivative work. Maybe. I don't think it's ever been tried in court. They can still blacklist you.
If it's made by randoms, then Microsoft is barely better than a rent-seeking middleman. If it's made by Microsoft, they should just put it in the f-ing game or move on to making something new to get more money.
Neither of those really sound like a problem with Minecraft for my purposes.
It feels like monetizing something that used to be free and built by passionate tinkerers for its own sake. It's destroying yet another part of that hacker culture some people so very often reminisce about on this site.
Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.
As far as I know, you can still write free mods outside the mod store to your heart's content, just as you ever could. The existence of paid mods doesn't seem to limit your ability to do that.
> with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children
I don't really understand why those things are bad? Making your server executable available for dedicated servers is common (and good!) and selling paid mods just seems like selling software to me
edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)
> Minecraft itself is benign
So, I dont think anyone said it was their fault, just that it's being exploited.
There is Minecraft the standalone game that you play either by yourself or on a private server with friends you know IRL. That's totally fine.
Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.
The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.
Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.
I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.
You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.
That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.
There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…
It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error
Microsoft forces login these days for single player play, and jams ads, social networking crap.
As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.
So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?
Screw it.
Exactly, everything wrong with Minecraft started with Microsoft. They took a fun, harmless, and free game so that they could profit from it and they've been working at making it increasingly harmful ever since.
Have you considered not tying your encryption keys to your child's online activities? I can understand the thrill of danger, but I'm not that much of a gambler myself.
I was fine with Minecraft until the kids started wanting to install all kinds of mods, which as far as I know are random executables you download from shady websites.
As someone who grew up on Industrial Craft 2, you can really miss out on a lot of incredible, free, content if you write off minecraft mods entirely.
And many of those mods at worse might have a donation link if any kind of monetary discussion at all.
Mods are the lifeblood of Minecraft though, they are incredible.
just another surface for predators to access underage targets. I guess one thing with Minecraft specifically is there’s a veneer of positive / educational content to smuggle that access beneath - schools have lessons that include Minecraft play, you don’t get that with Fortnite or Roblox, so it seems more ‘innocent.’
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
Most people on this website can run a Minecraft server themselves for their kids and their kids' friends. That seems to be the way to go tbh.
where would creeps even contact kids on Minecraft? the only officially sanctioned servers are on Bedrock and tightly moderated, everything else is plastered with Microsoft-sanctioned warnings about unmoderated play
And the one things kids avoid, without prejudice, is unmoderated play.
Agree massive headache. Our kids go to the boys and girls club after school where they were playing roblox during computer time. Some parents apparently complained and it’s now banned. Not sure of that is local or nation-wide. They were kind of annoyed but they seem to understand why. I am definitely worried about giving them the tools they need to navigate the online jungle when they are older.
School (or parents) running local servers for kids in school to play to avoid the whole bunch of dangers of open online would be interesting turn back to gaming roots
Curious, what have they moved on to? Is it better than Fortnite and the other games you've identified?
To be specific: Bedrock Minecraft bad. Java Minecraft good.
Epic made a deal with Unity, apparently they intend to work around stores by turning Fortnite into a game store.
Do you have link? How does Unity make money running in Fornite which uses Unreal?
See Unite 2025 keynote, also https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/unity-and-epic-gam...
Unity makes money as usual, the people doing those games pay their professional licenses to Unity.
What's wrong with Minecraft? I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but am pretty impressed with how little control they have so far exerted over Java Edition, they even made modding easier recently by removing obfuscation. You can run your own server as much as you want with no fees, obligations or anything. And unless the kids know a server address, they can't easily join some third party server with weird stuff going on. Not that I ever heard of one of those, but I'm sure they must exist.
Roblox is a dystopian nightmare in comparison.
As others have said there's a big difference between the Minecraft "we" (the tech community growing up on Beta versions of Minecraft) know and the Minecraft of today.
The subsequent versions also developed the game mechanics a lot to turn it into something closer to an RPG than the early, bare-bones sandbox game with minimal, well-understood mechanics and the rest purely up to the players' creativity.
There's nowadays an abundance of Pay-to-Win servers with custom mechanics to enable that, and I'm sure a lot of unsavory people preying on children. The social media (YouTube/etc) community around it has exploded too in a way I don't recall it before (I used to be into Minecraft videos back in the ~2012 era, and what I see nowadays grosses me out in comparison).
Minecraft is infested with ads including massive in-game ads and advertisers are all over servers, popular online influencers, etc.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/lacoste-x-minecraft
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Universal_Studios_Event
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-the-hell-do-you-throw-a-m...
Apparently Minecraft became what Second Life wanted to be.
Java Minecraft (the old version, moddable, self-hostable) and Bedrock Minecraft (windows/console only, no self-hosted servers) are quite different.
The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.
With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
what have they replaced Fortnite with? more physical play or something digital?
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.
You can't let them out because they keep getting killed by automobiles.
https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highes...
https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
Summer's highest case of kid accidents that ended in hospital in my country were the escooters, parents just buy whatever looks good in ad, not caring to train kid (technically moped license is needed) or even get one that's actually legal (with speed limit).
End result - machine capable of going 50km/h or faster (think they caught one doing 90) in hands of young teen or outright kid. Hell, there was even a trucker that reported getting overtaken by one...
I also hear lots of scooter accidents, and that is way too fast. The overwhelming number of deaths is still cars.
I dug into this statistic for my city recently and found the majority of reported "scooter accidents" were actually occurrences of car drivers crashing into someone on a scooter.
Actual solo-scooter serious crashes were rare.
I'd been riding bikes with my friends around the block since the age of 6. Parents didn't chase us around and minded their own business instead of nanomanaging us into absolute snowflakes that modern children have become. We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts, and showed up at home just to check in and have a quick lunch. We did a bunch more things many parents would deem insane these days (and even our own, should they know)...
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom and came into adulthood with a bunch of wonderful warm memories of our childhoods, free of any stigmas or psychological trumas.
This modern fear-based attitude towards childhood is beyond sick.
Now before anyone says "but pedophiles and terrorists" - mind you, that was 80's USSR, Chikatilo had still been at large, the gossip was there but wasn't amplified enough to put everyone into scared trance like modern mass-media does.
Literally nothing has changed in the society since then, maniacs were around just like they are now, but the attitude towards the outside world has been so blown out of proportion today, that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
> that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
There's a lot of blame for parents, much of it deserved. But when you have CPS being called for kids playing in the woods or parents charged with manslaughter when some one else runs over their kid you realize this is now going against the grain to resist this stuff.
It just seems insane to me that this mentality has been allowed to take root. I live in an area where kids on bikes are a regular sight, any time the weather is even halfway decent. Just last year, I came across a brother and sister riding up the forest preserve bike trail with fishing poles. But the media-driven "fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear" narrative has really done a hell of a lot of harm to society.
I always wonder what happened here. I remember hearing about how CPS was chronically underfunded in the 90s and did not even have the resources to investigate every case of serious abuse. But now they have the resources to go after parents that let their 10 year olds walk 2 blocks to a park? Did we start pumping funding into CPS or something? This is like if the cops started ticketing people for jaywalking.
> We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks
As someone who thinks kids should have freedom, like kids in Germany or Japan have, I hate it when ridiculous arguments like these show up.
Look, if you was regularly doing all that, you probably should not have all that freedom. But, most kids are actually more reasonable, if raised right.
What problem with me as I am now would you solve if you had any power to prevent me from being a kid and doing pretty common things kids were doing then?
See, neither me nor any of my friends became terrorist bombers, heck, there is not even a single stuntman around us! On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision. We knew what we did. No amount of nannying will fix kids who lack the touch with the harsh reality, as it takes feeling some pain sometimes to be responsible and not inflict pain on others.
> On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision.
I have no reason to believe that. The issue with 2 out of 3 activities you listed is also the danger or damage to OTHERS and their property. Which you do not even noticed, clocked or cared about. The only thing you care about is you feeling some pain, presumably.
Cool, stop everyone else from being a nanny then. You pull the stuff you and I did as kids in most places now and you'll have the police and CPS show up.
Also nothing says survivor bias as statements like:
It is nonsense to use your own example and imply it was safe, because you are mostly blind to the failure modes of the counterhistorical damaged or dead.However, I agree with you. Kids raised in dangerous rural areas do learn. I had my fair share of close calls as a child in my city! I feel lucky to have had so much freedom. 30 years later I was told one guy I knew as a child was convicted of pedophilia: I still remember his awesome basement but I don't recall any bad close call with him (perhaps I was ugly : sorry sicko).
We don't notice many dangerous close calls. Hopefully we learn from from other close calls we did notice... I remember hammering a blank gun cartridge (ramset) until it exploded and thinking I shouldn't do that again. I also did a lot things with fire that I shouldn't have!
Some high risk activities are difficult to learn from. Philip K Dick writing about the dangers of the drugs he took: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642422
till you are with that kid that is a bit too brave and a bit too eager and they do drop in some hole and break a leg or worse. That's what parents are afraid of, they remember some "close" accident in their childhood and want to make their kids not get chance to do a mistake.
Now ideally parents would just keep an eye on them, teach the kids, and maybe even "help" in potentially dangerous-yet-fun-for-kid stuff to make it not dangerous
...but parents now don't want to spend time just like parents back then didn't wanted to spend time and let kids alone to their own devices. Only difference before parents kicked kids outside while now parents give them ipad...
In no way was I a neglected kid. Parents still spent a huge deal of time with me, dad taught me drawing, astronomy, English, played guitar for me, we listened to music together, played games, walked together, printed photos, rode snow slegde downhill in the winter. Me being allowed to spend time outdoors with my friends was perfectly a part of their caring, not an attempt to get rid of me.
This is in stark contrast with the way parents want their children to be near and observed, but separated with black mirrors.
Now, please don't think that I blame every modern parent out there. There are enough good parents around even today. What I talk about are the trends in general.
Same experience, same feelings.
Unfortunately, I don't see how kids would stick to offline experiences anymore if you just turn them loose in the neighborhood, because one of the other kids will undoubtedly have unfettered internet access, so the kids will likely just end up clustered around their computer or phone.
inmyday.txt
> made explosives out of match sticks, bolts and nuts
I used to do similar crazy things, had this friend who liked to play a kind of a game of chicken with an M-80, see who will hold on to it the longest. He would've been 45 years old today. /s
My elder brother would've been 47 this year should he not die aged 2 of sudden acute disease that doctors of that day and place couldn't stop. What's your point?
That "things were better in the old days, all this safety culture is pointless" overlooks the tragedies we became inured to back in those days?
I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.
[dead]
Thankfully? Why don't you just forbid him to play Fortnite? Sounds like your son doesn't listen to you, and that's a problem.
Schools are the problem. Hear me out.
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
If the all class plays Fortnite and that is the only way they get socialized, his parents should consider moving him to another school. Many kids don't play this kind of stuff and actually prefer hanging out.
This kind of approach is also invalid. So what everyone plays Fortnite? There are many places to get socialized with other kids. The kid likes basketball? Sign him up to a basketball team; he likes to play music? Sign him to some band; etc. Kids shouldn't surrender to peer pressure.
I agree schools are also a problem, but not the main problem.
Yes, it's quite easy to change to the school with the "correctly"-behaved children in the USA. It won't solve any of the other structural issues that grade-separation causes, but at least this one has an easy answer!
See last week's thread on why more parents homeschool.
Has an authority ever forbid you to do something and you still did it?
If so, was it a problem that you didn't listen?
I'm not a parent, but fortnite is not like smoking or drugs, common. If you don't let kids grow over this kind of bad content, they will never become good discriminators.
If they grow on it they will normalize this bad content. If someone didn't grow on Fortnite and then hear somebody wastes 6h a day on Fortnite, they will think "this guy is nuts".
Everybody consumes bad content when they are a child, and everybody grows over it, becoming bored of it, and then looking for something better to do.
What show did you like when you were a kid? Do you still like it? Are you eager to consume it in the same amount as you did? If not, it means you grew over it.
When I was a child I loved the Monkey Island series, completing them several times a year. Solving the puzzles made feel smart, and the jokes made me chuckle. But now? I could hardly complete the high-res remakes or even the latest title. The puzzles are either too simple or just nonsensical try-and-error, I find the story boring and shallow (compared to other content I consume now), and none of the jokes really hit the spot anymore.
South Park even has an episode about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRFQ_333_Y
I think forbidding kids to access content they crave is wrong and cruel, as you are basically forbidding them from exploring their tastes, forbidding them from becoming interesting adults with refined and deep tastes.
Even in the case of alcohol, I think people should explore it and their limits (getting wasted) when they are young. I have an aunt who never tried alcohol until she was in her 40s, and she went through the same phases as teenagers; however, at that age getting too drunk too often has serious social consequences. She spiraled out of control, becoming alcoholic, and then later addicted to other drugs. I am not a psychology expert, but I always thought that her problem was that she was too old to explore this path.
In my country we have an idiom I like: "potro que no galopa, de caballo se desboca", which means "colts that don't gallop become wild horses".
People are downvoting this but it's the correct response. I will never worry about Roblox because my child will never be able to play it at home. Problem solved. I understand that maybe non-technical people might not know to think about these things, but in this crowd this response should be the most upvoted. These things are poinsons. Don't feed your children poison. It's pretty simple. "They'll be left out!" Good! While other children consume poison my child will be left out from consuming poison.
I'm happy parents like you exist. I was growing up in the time it started being acceptable to give 10 year olds smartphones, and I desperately wanted one. My parents didn't get me one (mostly because we were broke). I eventually got one and while I will sing the praises of letting kids access the internet with less guardrails, the instant always connected access to the internet did a number to my mental health and I eventually switched to a dumbphone.
They'll still play it with their friends at school.
[dead]
Victorian Dad is on HN
My money's on non-dad.
Same. I read his other replies, he definitely comes off as somebody who does not have experience with the complexities of raising children in today's world.
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.
Isn’t this just called “having a discord server” or even a group text? If you only want to talk with people you know outside the game, you don’t need the game to facilitate that.
most of the Roblox predation is occurring on Discord, so not a solution
(and actually explains why the CEO this article is about feels like its not his problem, because as long as people keep pointing fingers in the wrong direction for our legal system, then the CEO and Roblox corporation will be impervious and their efforts seen as sufficient)
That means your kid has joined a random person's Discord server without your knowledge.
This would be trivial to implement well. Give the parents a console where they can paste in usernames. Most classes already have parents whatsapp groups or similar, so it’s easy enough to broadcast the usernames, or create a shared google doc.
Console access could also be required to create new accounts. The article says it is currently trivial for kids to just create an adult account and bypass all the parental controls.
I don't think it's a terrible idea. You could make the keys some sort of amiibo-like NFC device or trading card.
There is probably some way you could toy-ify it and sell a lot of units
Parents have whatsapp groups for their kid's classes? That's news to me. When did that become the norm?
I saw it become a thing more than a decade ago
Nintendo kind of tried that with "friend codes" but they were just annoying and spread online anyway, which is kind of fair since today it's not uncommon for people to be friends with people in distant places and the internet should allow us to be able to connect and play with each other no matter where we are.
The original solution to just playing with local friends was LAN parties, but private servers were great too where they were actually private/hosted entirely by the players and not just part of some corporation's online platform.
Fwiw this is why I was thinking of a hardware solution, with some sort of hardware code shared via Bluetooth you could make it so it can't be shared online.
It doesn't even have to be super cryptographically secured against someone getting their own code off of it, since that's probably beyond most children.
You would want to make sure that people can't just sniff them or something though.
I think it's very technically possible with a lil bit of cooperation from industry: Private servers that use school creds to login. Now:
* kids play with other kids with same school, worst that can happen is learning some fun words from upper classmate * both teacher and parents can join and play or keep an eye on them * with a bit more it could be segregated to per class /grade server too
They could sell custom ubikeys/whatever. Kids love Tonies. A custom USB stick/NFC/air tag would be "easy" and profitable.
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.
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.
> Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time
Hard habit to kill given that so many also offload many of the responsibilities to schools
> That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.
That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).
It was fucking great.
And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option
What important aspects of gameplay are destroyed by age-restricting DMs?
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.
I'd say TFA and thread are both talking about this. Quoting the article-
> Understanding how attractive Roblox would be to predators, the company long ago could have blocked unrestricted contact between adults and minors.
Contact here seems to be about DMs or equivalent, since I don't think grooming and kidnapping preparations are happening in public forums? So with or without involvement of a physical key-exchange, I'd say that curbing private personal contact is the crux, and it's easily doable without effecting other aspects of the game
hell, the argument that it's needed to allow users to collaborate is dumb. Just have a list of specified phrases and severely limit other forms of communications, we figured this out with club penguin people it's not that hard
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.
One possibility: hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children or connects them with predators, and let them figure out how they'd like to avoid that liability. Could be through building something more robust (e.g. only allowing kids to play with pre-whitelisted friends, not any anonymous user), or hiring a legion of moderators, or through not building such a platform at all. That's up to them.
We don't need to prescribe what they ought to do. It's sufficient to say what we have here is unacceptable and make fixing it be a them problem.
This !! 100% Match the relation between power/control with reliability/consequences, instead of damning us all to ID for every Internet use (and that is coming) and so immensely risk that we get access to critical information and/or face increasing censorship. That would require a change of perception, but it would solve so many problems, from the one discussed here with Roblox as an example to food contaminated with whatever to appliances quality.
"hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children"
If that didn't happen with pornography websites in the 90s/2000s it's probably not happening now.
> e.g. only allowing kids to play with pre-whitelisted friends
if any of your friends are playing the game and the server is not full, they already try to put you in the same server
> 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.
If it's inappropriate for him to have a "position," he should not be saying things like claiming "Roblox is a problem"
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.
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.
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-...
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.
> 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
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=RXhyx-vVG_Y
Am I the only one who was really underwhelmed? I saw that it was supposedly a very tense trainwreck situation and sure, it gets sarcastic and stuff, but most of it was
Interviewer: "so I heard you were/are doing a bad job with moderation"
CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time
Repeat.
I mean, at no point did the CEO say anything interesting about the moderation problem or what they are doing. The interviewers seem too skeptical to be genuinely interested. He explains to them that cost =/= quality and that 2016 =/= 2025 for what feels like an eternity. I was bored.
> CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
So historically, when someone accepted an interview yet refused to engage with any questions, or stay on topic, AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation.. it was considered unhinged and obviously crazy behavior.
If interviewee acts clueless, drawling, or drooling then they could be pretty uncooperative and mostly get a pass because it's not very polite to point out stupidity. But for the big bonus crazy-points though, interviewee may opt in to escalation, becoming unabashedly and almost childishly combative, talking over each other, etc. Obviously all of these tactics are pretty normalized now though.
> I was bored.
This is basically the goal. After the interviewee realizes the interviewer is hostile, they just double down on their talking points to signal to investors and ignore the intended audience of the interviewer. Mistake on the interviewers part honestly to publish it at that point IMO.
Well said, my reaction was basically, what he is saying is not really for a listener like me.
> AND also was not interested in the smooth polish of PR-style transitions that would give an appearance of basic cooperation..
I agree this is a big part of it and would add that the "unhinged" look is probably just a lack of PR skill. Both sides are hostile but the interviewers "win" here by staying within the rules of the game, and they also do a beautiful job of sort of winking at the audience like "wow this dude is crazy right?"
It's impressive but sorta annoying, I'd rather listen to actual content.
"I thought we were going to be talking about something else, but I want to talk about anything you guys want"
doesn't talk about the thing they want
It is redundant and I don't think it is a trainwreck either
Yeah that was a little cringe. Once he starts laying out on the sarcasm thick you tell he's pissed. He runs one of the biggest games out there and the audience is majority children and they have been in the news a lot for not doing enough to protect their kids that play their game.
I'm more shocked he's been around in the industry for 20 years and still hasn't learned media discipline. All he had to do was be a little empathetic and explain how they were doing everything they can do keep kids safe. Would have just been another run of the mill CEO interview.
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.
Tbh making Roblox illegal feels like the same moral panic that our parents had around metal music, hip-hop, and arcades.
My kid plays Roblox, I prevent her from talking to others, and I police the Robux purchases. It really is a fun platform. The problem is for parents that aren't technical, or are negligent and don't know how to police it.
Don't be so dismissive! In practice...
- You cannot prevent your child to login and play at least 15mn (without manually resetting the password in the kid account) - combine this with the fact you cannot prevent changing the password reset email on the child account, and in practice you cannot prevent your child from using roblox - You cannot prevent gift card to be used - There's no way to trace gift cards usage at all - Roblox will remove controls at some ages without warning you - Deleting your kid account is a fight (it's been two weeks and roblox is asking me proof of ownership I cannot give since they don't exist) - You cannot prevent fear of missing out - You cannot control pay to win games - You cannot prevent your child face to be scanned and shared for "age control" - Same for your own face - Probably more...
Oh and don't forget there's absolutely no way to prevent your kid to have multiple accounts, and have a parallel life you know nothing about.
You cannot prevent someone from robbing and killing you either. That doesn't mean the law has no value. It sets a standard for conduct and creates a psychological expectation. If violated, it enables punishment.
I mean to a degree this is true of any kid who is that determined to go against their parents’ wishes. You can’t prevent a kid from making friends with the bad kids while at school, you can’t prevent a kid from playing the asphyxiation game, you can’t prevent a kid from sniffing solvents (they’re everywhere). At some point you just have to do your best and hope things turn out ok.
I think parents (not fully unfoundedly) expect more of a playground experience from something advertised as a "game for children", so for them it follows that they should precisely not have to manually police it.
> Tbh making Roblox illegal feels like the same moral panic that our parents had around metal music, hip-hop, and arcades.
I feel like this argument has become a cliche in itself. Sometimes things are worth panicking about, and limiting access to things like cigarettes or gambling for children has been a real benefit to society. The same could be true for the dark patterns listed above.
It goes beyond that though. There are games and in-game content that aren't being reviewed. There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).
Anyone can make a Roblox game and publish it, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of moderations or verification going on. And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways.
> And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways
I had blocked chat on my kid's account and thought I was ok. Then I see her playing one game and ask her what she's doing. She says she's updating her character status (description etc) to talk to other players.
> There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).
Gambling and facilitating sexual predation is probably worth regulating, but I don't find tasteless jokes a sufficient cause for intervention.
Nor is this even a remotely new phenomenon. I was on Newgrounds as a pre-teenager when people were making wacky flash games about school shootings and 9/11.
That is where content rating should come in, and games should be reviewed by Roblox staff before being approved. Then, Roblox age restrictions could play a role in keeping a 7-year old from a seeing photos of a murder.
Apparently, for all the "free speech requires us all to tolerate nazi" logic I hear here all the the time, a mere rumor of maybe someone being jerk toward fascist is enough to go all the other way.
Roblox do actually takes down violent content, in reality. But that is never the important part.
> I prevent her from talking to others,
Honestly the voice comms have been a nice upgrade and I find I mind it a lot less than text. It's a lot easier to confirm the person on the other side is not some middle aged creep. It's also a lot more ergonomic for talking with friends (though they already tend to use facetime calls in the background)
I used to work at the local after school club a few years ago and we had to have several interventions when the 8-10 year old girls were talking about the grown men they were talking to through Roblox.
The grooming going on there is a real problem. At least more awareness for parents would be a good thing.
I mean, gambling for underage children is already illegal due to a myriad of reasons. I'd argue the psychological design of gacha games should be limited. Building patterns that get adults addicted, and advertising them specifically to children is the problem.
In the same way if a casino advertised child roulette wheels, I'd want legislation to step in.
I would not be against banning sale of any type of mystery or lootbox mechanics to those under age of 18. Including all digital and physical products. Yes, some things will be lost, but I think it will be for better.
It’s tough to put into law because this could easily cover innocuous things like gas station gashapon machines, school raffles, and Pokemon cards. Most people aren’t going to support a ban on those. And when you try to try to target the law too narrowly, you can run into problems with loopholes or legal precedent that prevents discriminatory and targeted legislation (there is precedent around equal protection).
I do think people should push for voluntary limits on gacha mechanics, because they are awful when overused and are probably harmful for a small percentage of the population that’s prone to gambling. Steam would probably be fine with rating/age gating games that heavily rely on these mechanics, the hard part is getting Google and Apple on board. Micropayments from “whales” (high spenders) provide a lot of revenue for them.
I’m also not entirely sure that gacha mechanics alone are that bad, it’s when you combine them with currency (virtual or real) that it becomes a huge problem. Absent currency it’s usually a self-limiting problem, because overuse of the mechanic makes the game worse.
Looking at many of these markets when you get to older demographics that have capital they start to look lot less innocuous. The amount of money and rampant speculation with random toy boxes and card games is something I question as much as actual gambling. There is lot that needs to be done to change general public opinion on this. At least when kids are involved.
I think in general movement to direction where you know exactly what you will get is significantly more healthy. There will still be lot of people who cannot control their spending. But removing the chase sounds desirable to me.
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.
I try to comment on Roblox whenever it comes up as my daughter was pulled into a grooming pedo gang through Roblox.
Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754#32015542
I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
They created the system that allows it. StarCraft had user generated content, but no real gambling because the games ended within an hour or so, and no state was kept.
If they want to create a platform for children gambling and facilitate the payments, yes let's figure out how to send them to prison. They're not stupid. They know all of the reasons why they have a $60B market cap. That's 2/3 of Nintendo for making a "free" game.
Right, but it's also the responsibility of Roblox to moderate and avoid those things from happening, especially when their product is both aimed primarily at children with a userbase of mostly children
That's where people understand Roblox wrong, they do actually manually pick and promote some of these dangerious "games" on their homepage.
Which kinda makes it to "their content"
Cool then, to post robox content you need to have a verified ID.
Why is it a societal issue rather than just a parenting issue? Just don't let your kids play roblox. It's what I do and it works fine.
I mean, if someone was on a street corner selling child friendly cigarettes, I wouldn't call that a parenting issue.
I think parenting is one aspect, but surely you see how given it's a platform that advertises itself specifically for children, in the same way as if there was a children channel on the TV telling your kids to smoke crack, maybe someone should step in
Yea, we'd charge the person on the corner selling the cigarettes. We wouldn't sue the city for selling cigarettes just because it happened in the city, even if the person selling them paid their taxes (so the city made money on it).
We would expect the 'city' to police the illegal cigarette sellers, and vote them out if they didn't.
I think it becomes a societal issue when the product is specifically aimed at children as opposed to simply existing.
As a society, we limit children's access to predatory stuff all the time - porn, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling/lottery, guns, even swear words on the public airwaves.
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.
[dead]
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.
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.
It's definitely this. I live in one of the safest cities in the country, in the Midwest. The other day on some local Facebook group, I saw a mom trying to find someone to pick up her kids from middle school and elementary school every day. It was a 10 and 5 minute walk respectively that EVERYONE in that neighborhood took 30 years ago. No busy streets, nothing. Sidewalks and everything. Absolutely insane.
I also live in an incredibly safe area and had a friend from outside the US say it is like a horror movie after walking around a few times on a beautiful summer night when they visited.
Perfect summer night and there is not a person to be seen. They felt like they were walking around in some kind of zombie horror movie that all the people had vanished.
It's hard to tell. You have to wait a generation or two to see the long term effects, as people will still have their earlier social habits.
It feels as though people slowly learned that they could get away with not introducing themselves to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner, and other activities that were once assumed.
1950s was the baby boom so is not a great example. Children per adult has been falling ever since and suburban areas growing.
I wrote starting in the 1950s. It was certainly true for other generations like gen X (me) and also for older millennials.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The problem is the Roblox games have exclusive timed events that give the children FOMO. So much that they have breakdowns and refuse to do their normally scheduled activities. And it changes their behavior.
That sounds like me when my parents made me go to bed instead of watching "The A-Team" or "Knight Rider".
Broadcast TV (UHF/VHF) was exclusive timed events which gave everyone FOMO, at least until the VCR became commonplace and affordable.
That gave you the ability to time-shift, as long as you could figure out how to set your VCR clock.
Same for me with religious education class and Saturday morning cartoons.
Any social games have this. I wasn’t an Everquest or WoW player, but I knew some, and scheduled raids with friends were a common thing. Minecraft servers hold events, etc.
You probably bought or pirated the games you played at the LAN party, maybe once and some DLC. You probably played with at least a few people you knew and the games had a goal - capture the flag or the bases or something - that often you had to work with a team to accomplish.
Roblox is designed from the ground up to sell Robux. Not to promote fun games or anything interesting in the least.
The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
The events have also caused massive arguments and begging and pleading at my house since Roblox is rarely allowed (and would never be allowed if I had my way...)
> The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
There’s at least two whole genre of games like this: idle games, and the more aggressive gacha games (which more often let you pay to win). I guess the differentiator with Roblox is the social aspect.
I do think pay to win is a problem, FWIW.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Those games are pointless too though? As are nearly all games.
There’s legitimate criticisms of Roblox moderation and the business model. But games are games, and I feel like criticism of some Roblox-specific issues are getting entangled with normal gaming behavior. I get that you may not love to see kids who ignore you when they’re engrossed in a game, but that’s just how games are. Limit game time if it’s a problem, and/or make them earn their own money for pay-to-win junk. You’re the parent.
These arguments are nuts. The kids I know play roblox games ... honestly because they like the games. That is really really it. I am very confident they are not earning rare robux on it, because I know what they play.
> So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
Frankly, Doom was pointless for christ sake, as pointless as it gets. And yes, obviously a game appealing to 8-12 years old is pointless to a teenager or adult. No, kids wont play the grandpa games. And yes, they do not want to play only games adults deemed educational or training whatever you think counter strike trains enough. They play them literally because they find those games fun.
If you think DOOM and CS aren't brain rot, you might be just falling into nostalgia. Shooting demons and other players and spraying bloody gibs is absolute brain rot.
I play Roblox with my 9 year old, and no, they're not anymore brain rot than DOOM or Quake deathmatches were. Capture the flag or tower defense was almost never the point. It was being first in a deathmatch.
Quite frankly today's Roblox games tend to be a lot more enlightening, innovative and entertaining. Not all of course but many.
> 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.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Still, I don’t see too much in modern gaming that’s different from what we had as kids. The gacha/gambling mechanics are overused and this might be detrimental. But I definitely spent days glued to the screen back in the day even without that stuff.
(The moderation problems in the article are clearly a new and separate issue that needs to be dealt with.)
Color me naive but we're there micropayments, sex and actual gambling in DOOM?
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.
I think porn came slightly later, in Duke Nukem 3D
Adults definitely do this too.
I bet adult tennis instructors get a lot of cancellations on Super Bowl Sunday. In certain circles, you're going to have a hard time scheduling a screen-free dinner party on Oscar night, or opposite the finale of a hit TV show.
Isn't it obvious that you mention discrete events when, now, depending on the number of apps and online presence there is a virtually continuous set of events?
How dare this child be excited for a special event in his game!
This feels like an incredibly normal thing though? Kids oftentimes want to do things that are highly stimulating and "fun" in substitute for things that are more rewarding, often to the point of obstinance.
And I don't want to defend Roblox, their laissez faire attitude towards predators abusing their platform is abhorrent and disgusting. But this anecdote is about as old as civilization.
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.
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".
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?
Oh yeah, I remember 20 years ago when the Internet was fine for a child to brows unsupervised.
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?
> How did we deal with that?
We haven't. It keeps happening. Now what?
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.
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.
And so instead we should expect corporations to fill that role?
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.
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)
> 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.
the benefits of roblox?
> 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.
> 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.
Acetylene is being marketed to children as something fun to play with ?
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.
A correctly manufactured chainsaw can be used safely by adults. Products like "MoonSoll and Magic Chems Fuel Bottles" [1], "Tesla Powerwall 2 AC Battery Power Systems" [2] and literally tens of thousands of other products listed at [3] have been determined that they can not be used safely by adults, and are literally taken off store shelves until the issues can be resolved. It is a normal, everyday occurrence that manufacturers are very motivated to not sell products that cannot be used safely, Hacker-Newsesque semantic nitpicking notwithstanding. If similar liabilities applied to software like Roblox (think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"), there would not be a Roblox without effective moderation.
[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Demlar-Recalls-MoonSoll-an...
[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Tesla-Recalls-Powerwall-2-...
[3] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls
The first example is a labeling and packaging issue, the second is a malfunctioning product. There are plenty of fuel oil bottles available on the market and other much sketchier (though not obviously malfunctioning) batteries that haven’t been pulled. The available alternatives are still dangerous and potentially flammable, they just don’t meet the criteria set for shipping, storing, and normal usage.
Chainsaws can be used somewhat safely, but they are never totally safe. Chainsaws are inherently dangerous. But if a broken chainsaw that always cuts off your arm makes it to market, yes it will be pulled whether it’s a recall or a lawsuit.
> think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"
Psychological harm is notoriously difficult to measure (was it really Roblox or was it bullying?) and is a political football. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to open that box for a multitude of reasons. (For one thing every website on the internet would immediately face a mountain of lawsuits.)
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.
> 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.
> If a restaurant served food that harmed people we wouldn't say
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.
Are you honestly comparing sugar or meat to child trafficking and abuse? Thats some serious black-and-white fallacy thinking there.
This sounds good as a sound bite. But barely any investigation cracks it. We don't police companies much because we have entire divisions of law enforcement who are supposed to be doing that job.
1. If a restaurant serves food that harmed people the health department is the avenue used to investigate and punish.
2. If a game company enables endangering children the FBI is the one responsible for investigating it.
etc etc.
I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
The nanny state is wrong which is why the OP is being downvoted.
1. It is the parent's fault for not monitoring their children. It is absolutely a reflection on poor parenting-by-proxy via video games. I don't understand why we continue to absolve parents of responsibility for everything.
2. We have legal avenues with which we have used and continue to use for the investigation of harmful things produced by companies.
3. If we cannot use (2) we should ask why - the answer is almost always follow the money.
4. Corporations should never, under any circumstance, be turned into police via lawfare.
The one catch here is that there are limited legal avenues, and your solution requires a robust legal system and laws which is what we don’t have. At the moment over -worked police departments have to play wack a mole going after every single perpetrator, and they also can’t see everything happening on these systems to police it.
As an example, organized crime thrived in the US at the turn of the century because we didn’t have the legal apparatus to deal with it. Not until the RICO act in 1970 did we finally start to stamp it out.
So exactly what we need are legal avenues to make sure that companies can’t purposefully enable child abuse in order to turn a profit which is exactly what’s happening here. (Regardless of what they claim, the evidence is overwhelming they know but don’t want to dent their income)
> I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.
I've come to the belief that there is a larger than we assume portion of the population that is either complicit in these things, or doesn't think that these types of behaviors are "that bad". (some of the comments here are, sadly, exactly that) It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of why these things are so hard to root out. Some of these people perhaps never had children, which might be part of the disconnect. But if I was the CEO of a company harming children in this way, I'd make it my life mission to stamp it out and find and prosecute the individuals involved.
What else must we think goes through these executives minds? It's got to be things like "It's not my kids, so I don't care?" or "It's not that bad, people are too sensitive", or "I don't care what happens to kids because I have anti-personality disorder (psychopath) and only care about making money"
> 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?
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?
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.
What law is being broken?
I literally said we need to pass laws to make it illegal. (ie knowingly allowing child trafficking or exploitation on your service)
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity how did they manage to sign up for Instagram? Browser? Asking for a friend
Ah great question, I wondered this myself as there was no phone involved here (in our household) and Instagram has been banned on my network for many years. It was from a friend's phone at school and that same friend later provided my child with an old galaxy tab to bring home, which was cleverly hidden under the carpet beneath the bed with wifi access to our neighbor's internet (provided by neighbor's kid as well). It's amazing the lengths they'll go through to circumvent rules.
EDIT: and if you're wondering where the initial exposure to Roblox came from, it was from an Android tablet I had at the time which was setup strictly for kids games (hence the FamilyLink with time limits and stuff)
Wow. Honestly if it weren't for the bad stuff I would be secretly proud of a kid like that.
> 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 don't want to kick you when you're down, but you tried a technical solution on a human problem.
I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Can you elaborate on what a "human" solution would be in your mind? For us, it was a combination of technical, educational, and traditional parenting as well as some therapy for other behavioral issues exhibited in school. We had after-school classes and sports. We played board games as a family. From our perspective, we were doing things correctly in both the technical and human aspect of it to make sure it never got to that point, yet it still happened.
It could of course be simply down to the fact that all children are different, but what worked for us is honesty and the closeness that brought.
I've see parents "talk" with their children, where it seemed more like they were talking _at_ them. I could see in the kids face he was putting on a show of listening (and pretending to go along with it), because that was the fastest track to going back to doing whatever he liked when they weren't watching.
Where it worked though, was getting closer to my children by admitting where I was at and where I was coming from. When they feel like you're really connecting with them.
I'm sure my kids still get up to much I'll (hopefully) never hear about, but that's normal. As long as the big overarching stuff is understood, I'll take that as a win.
Given what this person has gone through, if you want to be critical then I think you owe us a more detailed explanation what exactly would have worked better. Armchair parenting is very easy.
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.
Same as it always was. Reminds me of Tipper Gore with the panic to put explicit lyrics labels on records.
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?
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.
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.
How is an OS setting going to protect a child from the realities that people on the internet, especially anonymous people, may be creepy?
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
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
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?
Roblox is rated R16 for a reason in Germany.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
the signup page states in the Username box "Don't use your real name", and the facial verification doesn't need any personal details
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed to actual child sexual abuse being allowed on an online platform?
One of the comments above has a video of a guy arrested and admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.. that doesn’t sound like just some sort of over exaggerated panic.
> 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.
It wasn’t immediate obvious when those were occurring only years later.. so most likely we are seeing the tip of the iceberg.
> You’re comparing a hysteria over D&D where no one was actually harmed
People were definitely harmed, psychically, and physically - straight up to torture in 'conversion therapies' and death, over the D&D (and related RPG) hysteria.
> admitting to contacting several kids a day for a year.
Have you ever played online games? "Contacting several kids a day" is how internet chat works. I'm sure if it was up to you kids would only be able to play single player games and stay inside, god forbid they get struck by lightning or eaten by a polar bear.
What do you want gaming to do? Have a checkbox where you swear you're not a pedophile or something? That's on-par for most of these idiotic suggestions of how people seem to fucking think the internet and gaming works, and what sort of actual solution is viable.
Roblox tracks all the chat and hands it over to law enforcement and NCMEC. They restrict chat for . They give ample parental controls to limit chat/friends/interactions. Now they're adding AI-powered age validation (which I think is a terrible idea) just to appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk, nor apparently have the ability to teach your kids "hey maybe don't talk to creepy strangers who want you to send them images and give them your home address?"
Maybe watch the video. He wasn’t just chatting with them he was sexually abusing them online. He was using Roblox because they made it easy for him. Watch the video.
Your hand waving away is the type of behavior that is complicit in allowing this type of abuse to continue.
And this isn’t just about parents. In one breath you’ll complain about helicopter parents and the next you’ll say it’s the parent’s responsibility to prevent it. The callousness to the suffering of children is disgusting. That’s not just “how the internet works”
This is about not allowing companies to cultivate online spaces specifically enabling this behavior because it makes them money. Your comments indicate you either condone the behavior or work for Roblox or a company like it.
> appease more people like you who can't think critically about the risk
So sexual abuse is not a risk you take seriously?
> is complicit in allowing this type of abuse to continue.
I'm complicit? Get fucked you piece of shit.
Related:
Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477
do y'alls hold governments accountable for the crimes their citizens do?
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?
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.
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
> HN is heavily biased towards silencing any content that
... violates the guidelines, in particular:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
it usually devolves into a mess of a comments section because it's about freedom vs. control / moral panic vs. apathy.
I think they have some of algorithm that pushes down articles with too high a comment/upvote ratio
I'm seeing it on the front page now, with 300+ comments.
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?
Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.
My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.
Your kid has that private device because you gave it to them.
I left this [1] comment a few weeks ago, and I already knew people like you would have dogged on GP for giving their child this level of access and autonomy, just like I knew the HN thread from the other day about homeschooling was going to dog on people who allow their child to go to public school - because teaching children self-sufficiency, self-assurance, and confidence to deal with bad influences is a relic of a time gone by.
Parents would rather justify to themselves the act of building, end-to-end, what their child is exposed to and around - even when that's not how the world works, rather than building a child that knows how to handle themselves when exposed to, and around, anything - because that's ACTUALLY how adult life works.
There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety; but it's still a lot more fruitful than just hand-picking a child's exposure to any and all things during their most formative years - when they're SUPPOSED to be learning how to deal with exposure to as many things as possible, good and bad for them.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852694
The linked comment seems to imply that you have no kids of your own, and generally identify with a child still. That's fine, but not a good look for this kind of conversation.
Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical. That exposure does not build agency, it does the opposite. You cannot expect a child to be able to resist the combined effort of a multi-trillion dollar industry toward building maximally addictive things.
>"That's fine"
Glad we sorted that out. Barring that, I am not interested in what things you find to be a "good/bad look" for my participation in this conversation.
>"Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical."
They should not. And luckily for you, for at least 2/3 things you said, neither do adults. We've already established a baseline belief as a society that those (legally) require permissive access from subject matter experts, so I don't see your point. My originating comment - or the one I linked - certainly doesn't advocate for minors to have more permissive access to those (or any) industries than an adult?
For your comments onwards, you could have saved yourself a lot of time in your reply by acknowledging what I said in GP:
>"There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety;"
You are right that exposure does not build agency alone - but I never claimed such; access to guidance and mentorship builds better decision-making and problem-solving for a child, and letting them practice agency and autonomy in their own lives allows them to see real-world use cases and applicability of those decision-making and problem-solving skills.
It's how parenting worked before this newest helicopter-lite style of parenting emerged, which seeks to declare as many hardships, trials and tribulations in life as a boogeyman in which a child CANNOT interact with, and pressures parents to coddle their child and build a zero-problem world around them - when that's not how the real world works. In doing so, a parent does not equip their child with the tools to appropriately carry themselves in a sometimes inappropriate world.
> Glad we sorted that out
I read your "People like you" comment and got angrier and nastier than I should have. I apologize.
I will not continue this discussion. You're arguing against things I don't represent, and have assigned a lot of opinions to me after reading a one-sentence comment.
I appreciate the apology, and I want to apologize if "people like you" came off as prickly. I genuinely didn't mean *you* as a person, but rather "someone like you" as an entity that took an action I had expected to see; I knew that someone was going to leave a one-liner criticizing GP's choice to give their child a certain level of digital autonomy, and advocated for GP on their behalf. I should have said "someone" rather than "people like you".
That said, "arguing against things I don't represent" is generally how debates and newfound perspectives go, and I wish we could have continued. I certainly don't think I assigned any opinions to you, let me know if I'm amiss.
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.
I think your comparison is more apt than you think but not for the reason you say it is. The Internet of today is like the Las Vegas of today—a largely sterile corporate theme park whose only real goal is just separating you from your money and is ruthlessly efficient at it.
That was an intentional part of the analogy, as far as I know. It's big money.
I can at least understand being aware of what your kid is doing, but the number of people who say they just ban X outright in there house I'm afraid are gonna be shocked by their kid's actions when they leave the house. Better to teach them when they're young then to all of a sudden have them exposed to everything when they're an older teenager/18.
And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.
I find it weird that you are not DV since the stuff you list here has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people _and_ things have gotten much much worse. The internet is so much more prevalent than it was 15 years ago. The danger is much higher.
The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.
Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.
Both things can be true; there can be both a moral panic about the exaggerated harms of unrestricted internet access, but also as the internet became commonplace and law enforcement not keeping up, it's plausible and likely there are many more predators on it now than it was back in our days.
Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.
Attention maximization algorithms and dark patterns took over between then and now. It’s not the same place.
My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).
When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").
My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.
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.
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.
I grew up on the unrestricted internet, it doesn't mean I believe it was entirely good. I did (and DO!) many things that I realize are not beneficial, and do not want my children doing.
The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'
[dead]
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.
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.
It's hyper individualism that is fueling this type of capitalism, the notion that you owe nothing to anyone and other people in society are not your concern, society itself is not your concern, it’s only about what you want etc. It's like a pond, if you follow hyper individualism, you will extract as many fish from the pond as you can, without caring what happens next or others using the pond, and the fish will not be able to reproduce for future generations, others will not be able to get as many fish as they need etc. It needs to be balanced. As you say, there is something in between that can work, we do not need to choose only between extremes.
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.
> 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.
I don't really think that culture has existed lately, it kind of died out with the 2008 financial crisis. Now it's about naked use of power, whether political or economic.
The problem with constraints on individual freedom (which is essentially what happens when you constrain capitalism) is that no one agrees on what they should be, and therefore a segment of society will not be happy with them, and claim them as tyrannical oppression. Sometimes this is hysterical nonsense, sometimes it has a point.
Ultimately the antidote to unfettered capitalism is sensible policy crafted through political compromise. But largely Western politics itself has skewed towards extremes lately, few have the patience or understanding for this process, they want a quick fix.
> Capitalism needs constraints.
I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.
> 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...
The crony capitalism was brought to you literally by companies and millionaires scared of regulation and heavily pushing for deregulation. They supported Trump and republicans by large margin, especially financially.
If you think only one of the two parties of capital are to blame for this timeline, I have a bridge to sell you.
Democrats manufactured consent for Trump's rise in a 1000 ways over decades. Neoliberalism delivered us Trump, who is merely a symptom of this broken system.
Dems/Repubs play good cop/bad cop; always in service to capital interests. We have a uniparty, but people are fooled by reasonable election turnout and close elections. Democracy is an illusion in the US.
Yeah, you know what, the culpability of republicans is so much higher at this point, that yeah, they are the primary responsible for current state.
This both sides game is just how they were enabled again and again by people who like to frame themselves as reasonable above the politics center, but are in fact just their supporters.
Trump was elevated from meme tier gameshow host to serious candidate thanks to the Dem pied piper "strategy."
Dems put more effort into defeating Bernie than they did Trump.
We need to stop painting with the wide brush of "capitalism" like this.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
I don't think any actual socialist would ever argue for an oppressive Soviet state either. They'd want stuff like public firefighters, health care, sewage, roads, etc.
What is capitalism in service of society?
Social sector (non profits) have an important place in capitalist society as there are plenty of non-market / non-profit missions that are important.
Unfortunately nuance is kind of lost in today's politics.
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.
> 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.
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.
A colleague of mine had the idea that an easy solution for a lot of social media content issues would be any content given by an algorithm is exempt from safe harbor laws. You pick what users see? You’re responsible and liable.
> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.
That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.
> how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
Very Trump-like
Honestly, just another demonstration that lay people are unable to think of groups of people larger than a hundred.
Roblox might be the Jeffrey Epstein of video games.
[dead]
[dead]
> 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.