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

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

#141

Post by AlecSchueler »

parasubvert wrote: post #93
endymion-light wrote: post #18

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.

> 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.

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

#142

Post by whyenot »

d_sem wrote: post #108

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.

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

#143

Post by Nextgrid »

fhd2 wrote: post #37
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #6

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.

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…

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).

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

#144

Post by Delphiza »

socalgal2 wrote: post #136
endymion-light wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#145

Post by jaredklewis »

syntaxing wrote: post #127
d_sem wrote: post #108

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.

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.

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

#146

Post by throwaway_4566 »

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

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

#147

Post by bongodongobob »

whyenot wrote: post #142
d_sem wrote: post #108

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.

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

#148

Post by Nextgrid »

tjungblut wrote: post #15

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…

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.

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

#149

Post by roadside_picnic »

dimal wrote: post #90

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.

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

#150

Post by Delphiza »

tjungblut wrote: post #15

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…

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'
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