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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

#341

Post by Libidinalecon »

dimal wrote: post #63

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…

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".

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

#342

Post by swed420 »

watwut wrote: post #264
swed420 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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

#343

Post by gffrd »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #327
pupppet wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#344

Post by crazydoggers »

stuffn wrote: post #340
tyleo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)

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

#345

Post by phendrenad2 »

pupppet wrote: post #276
RyanHamilton wrote: post #267

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…

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.

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?)

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

#346

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

gffrd wrote: post #343
nh23423fefe wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

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

#347

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #289
Etheryte wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#348

Post by duxup »

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.

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

#349

Post by vibrio »

cwmoore wrote: post #308
bradlys wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if arcade games weren’t money hungry and painfully punishing purely to get more quarters out of children.

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.

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

#350

Post by acedTrex »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #173
acedTrex wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Mods are the lifeblood of Minecraft though, they are incredible.
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