The most impressive thing about Roblox is how many predatory parties they have managed to pack into one children's platform. The company itself with its microtransactions, cash hungry creators with lowest common denominator and/or sexualized content, creepy adults behaving badly, probably some hostile foreign governments in all likelihood. Maybe add in a 4chan integration next just to cover a wider spectrum of villainy.
There are parental controls that don’t seem to do much good at all. I set a filter so that my 6-year-old son would only see content that was rated for kids. The next thing I know I see he’s playing a prison riot simulator and having a shootout with the police. There were some appropriate games, but the screening just isn’t serious. When it’s game time, we pretty much stick to Mario and offline Minecraft.
Be sure not to pay for switch online. They bury a bunch of social media / data sharing opt-ins about halfway through the game, where parents will not discover them. (Look for Luigi to see if your kid opted in.)
I don’t think it’s serious in any platform of any scale. I remember having some pedo on AOL try to groom me as a 7(?) year old, except I was aware enough to punch out of the situation very quickly. The kind of thing basic keyword filters could have flagged and caught.
Similarly, I remember my families account being banned because I dared to say “Santa isn’t real” in a chat around the same timeframe.
Very serious administration for a billions dollar firm…
Now they’re trying to normalize mandatory “turn on the camera to access porn” services. Really?!?
As a parent, all I want is for the fucking thing to let zero people that I have not approved communicate with my kid in any way. This especially includes people that made games and gambling dens.
Roblox calling themselves the industry gold standard in online safety is about as ridiculous as Riot Games calling themselves the beacon of technical excellence in game development.
I've been saying we need a separate Internet for kids. Not just because of pedos, but because young adults don't have the same level of respect and filters that one should have when dealing with kids and it's exposing them to behavior they shouldn't. This is a great step.
Good start. But this still leaves them at the mercy of these tech companies.
Kids—especially pre-teens—should not have social media. There is just way too much evidence that this has harmed and is harming an increasingly class-segregated generation.
Gas stations are careful about selling cigarettes to kids. We need these developers to have even a shadow of that concern.
Not saying you're wrong, but it's more complicated than you think in many cases. The rot goes deep into society as a whole, which tech corpos then exploit.
30 years ago: Video games are harming our kids, ban it!
60 years ago: Rock and roll is harming our kids, ban it!
There is little evidence to support social media causes harm. Even correlations are weak. As a large study on the subject put it, the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
I mean.. you do you, but the data seems pretty clear. Social media use among children significantly impacts mental health in a negative way, in well designed study after study. There's a good summary out of the HHS (at least until they take it down): https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/...
You have any pointers to well designed studies that show it's as innocent as a video game or rock and roll?
>the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
Maybe regularly eating potatoes is a lot worse for a person that most of us currently realize. (They do have an extremely high glycemic index and high levels of oxalic acid.)
No, we don't. You need to teach your kids the skills to deal with the realities of the modern world before giving them unrestricted access to the internet.
It'd be nice if they'd do some simple common sense things - like give you a report of which games were being played and provide parental controls around which games can be played. It shocks me (but not really) that they haven't done this.
They are held back by the exact same technical obstacles that prevented Google from adding the ability to disable YouTube Shorts on your child’s account.
This is deeply concerning. No parent should be letting their kids faces be scanned with this. They claim to “delete” the image a videos after the scan, but make no mistake, the signature is saved and will be used to track the child online for the rest of their life. We need to have better protections around biometrics. Surveillance is not the solution we want.
"Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids].
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.
We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography."
No but look how hard they try and now they have a feature they can wiggle around with if something bad happens. It's theater as always with stuff like this. There is just no way of doing it without real inconvenience for every user. Inconvenience really hurts the bottom line...
There's no cheap way of doing it without inconvenience for every user. Rather than age checks, they could just remove the CSAE distribution groups, appropriately moderate abusive conduct, and so on. HN has basically no restrictions whatsoever, and it's hardly a hive of scum and villainy: it's not fundamentally difficult to accomplish this, you just have to put the work in.
As other kids say, two things can be true at the same time. And not lasting five minutes in a CoD lobby is going to be my new heuristic for picking friends. I don’t really need to know someone who isn’t bothered by that shit.
The most impressive thing about Roblox is how many predatory parties they have managed to pack into one children's platform. The company itself with its microtransactions, cash hungry creators with lowest common denominator and/or sexualized content, creepy adults behaving badly, probably some hostile foreign governments in all likelihood. Maybe add in a 4chan integration next just to cover a wider spectrum of villainy.
There are parental controls that don’t seem to do much good at all. I set a filter so that my 6-year-old son would only see content that was rated for kids. The next thing I know I see he’s playing a prison riot simulator and having a shootout with the police. There were some appropriate games, but the screening just isn’t serious. When it’s game time, we pretty much stick to Mario and offline Minecraft.
Be sure not to pay for switch online. They bury a bunch of social media / data sharing opt-ins about halfway through the game, where parents will not discover them. (Look for Luigi to see if your kid opted in.)
I don’t think it’s serious in any platform of any scale. I remember having some pedo on AOL try to groom me as a 7(?) year old, except I was aware enough to punch out of the situation very quickly. The kind of thing basic keyword filters could have flagged and caught.
Similarly, I remember my families account being banned because I dared to say “Santa isn’t real” in a chat around the same timeframe.
Very serious administration for a billions dollar firm…
Now they’re trying to normalize mandatory “turn on the camera to access porn” services. Really?!?
As a parent, all I want is for the fucking thing to let zero people that I have not approved communicate with my kid in any way. This especially includes people that made games and gambling dens.
Also, influencers.
Truly. My daughter and her friends play a lot on it but only a few games and I always have an ear out for which ones because it’s such a cesspool.
Roblox calling themselves the industry gold standard in online safety is about as ridiculous as Riot Games calling themselves the beacon of technical excellence in game development.
I've been saying we need a separate Internet for kids. Not just because of pedos, but because young adults don't have the same level of respect and filters that one should have when dealing with kids and it's exposing them to behavior they shouldn't. This is a great step.
> we need a separate Internet for kids
Good start. But this still leaves them at the mercy of these tech companies.
Kids—especially pre-teens—should not have social media. There is just way too much evidence that this has harmed and is harming an increasingly class-segregated generation.
Gas stations are careful about selling cigarettes to kids. We need these developers to have even a shadow of that concern.
Problem is some kids don't have alternatives to online. Just recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945114
Not saying you're wrong, but it's more complicated than you think in many cases. The rot goes deep into society as a whole, which tech corpos then exploit.
Today: Social media is harming our kids, ban it!
30 years ago: Video games are harming our kids, ban it!
60 years ago: Rock and roll is harming our kids, ban it!
There is little evidence to support social media causes harm. Even correlations are weak. As a large study on the subject put it, the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
This looks like yet another moral panic.
I mean.. you do you, but the data seems pretty clear. Social media use among children significantly impacts mental health in a negative way, in well designed study after study. There's a good summary out of the HHS (at least until they take it down): https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/...
You have any pointers to well designed studies that show it's as innocent as a video game or rock and roll?
>the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
Maybe regularly eating potatoes is a lot worse for a person that most of us currently realize. (They do have an extremely high glycemic index and high levels of oxalic acid.)
Potatoes are harming the kids, ban it?
Seriously though, the correlation is just weak - far to weak to actually draw conclusions from let alone ban it.
Dude no, sorry, those things have nothing on Roblox, it’s the most toxic damaging thing ever.
No, we don't. You need to teach your kids the skills to deal with the realities of the modern world before giving them unrestricted access to the internet.
while yes, they probably should, however, it wouldn't protect them from pedos.
We had AOL back in the day, but...
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It'd be nice if they'd do some simple common sense things - like give you a report of which games were being played and provide parental controls around which games can be played. It shocks me (but not really) that they haven't done this.
They are held back by the exact same technical obstacles that prevented Google from adding the ability to disable YouTube Shorts on your child’s account.
> ability to disable YouTube Shorts on your child’s account
Can I disable it on my account!?
So besides scanning your child's face they also want access to their phone contacts.
You can thank the Australian government for this change in direction.
This is deeply concerning. No parent should be letting their kids faces be scanned with this. They claim to “delete” the image a videos after the scan, but make no mistake, the signature is saved and will be used to track the child online for the rest of their life. We need to have better protections around biometrics. Surveillance is not the solution we want.
> the signature is saved and will be used to track the child online for the rest of their life
Source:
Remember, Roblox is toxic and exploits young people.
- Roblox Isn't a Game | Psychology Today // https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/video-game-health/20...
- Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
- Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
Roblox is Darker Than You Think (ft. Ruben Sim) - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av03P5D11PQ&t=55s
[dead]
Does that help with any of this?
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
"Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations. Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids]. We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69. After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography."
No but look how hard they try and now they have a feature they can wiggle around with if something bad happens. It's theater as always with stuff like this. There is just no way of doing it without real inconvenience for every user. Inconvenience really hurts the bottom line...
Fort Gayers want their limelight back
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-11258407
There's no cheap way of doing it without inconvenience for every user. Rather than age checks, they could just remove the CSAE distribution groups, appropriately moderate abusive conduct, and so on. HN has basically no restrictions whatsoever, and it's hardly a hive of scum and villainy: it's not fundamentally difficult to accomplish this, you just have to put the work in.
What a load of nothingburger. There's so much Roblox has done wrong, and they choose to focus on teenagers playing the game with edgy usernames?
As the kids would say, "they wouldn't survive 5 minutes in a COD lobby"
As other kids say, two things can be true at the same time. And not lasting five minutes in a CoD lobby is going to be my new heuristic for picking friends. I don’t really need to know someone who isn’t bothered by that shit.