291–300 of 399 posts
Roblox is rated R16 for a reason in Germany.
Communication capabilities were merely a tertiary concern - after monetization.
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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 c…
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.
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> 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 Sco…
People were definitely harmed, psychically, and physically - straight up to torture in 'conversion therapies' and death, over the D&D (and related RPG) hysteria.
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.
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 nightma…
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 leg…
If that didn't happen with pornography websites in the 90s/2000s it's probably not happening now.
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 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.
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.
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 inst…
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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…
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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 b…
> 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.