Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 399 posts

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

#331

Post by immibis »

cess11 wrote: post #269
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#332

Post by hintymad »

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?

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

#333

Post by chickensong »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #100
Pet_Ant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#334

Post by Libidinalecon »

bongodongobob wrote: post #147
whyenot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#335

Post by uniq7 »

worldsavior wrote: post #188
uniq7 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

AlexandrB wrote: post #283
deltoidmaximus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by herbst »

socalgal2 wrote: post #133
lenerdenator wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

> 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.

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"

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

#338

Post by ls612 »

mock-possum wrote: post #58
acedTrex wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats wrong with Minecraft, that seems like an odd inclusion in the list?

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, mi…

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.

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

#340

Post by stuffn »

tyleo wrote: post #7
crazydoggers wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN