Roblox has a seemingly impossible to solve problem with child predators. Kids have the oddest talent of being able to stumble into the most unknown, niche games where these people lurk. Roblox now has voice chat as well and you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention.
Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays.
As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
> you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention
Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
Because the company knows that there are child predators on their site, and not only do they not care, but that is basically their tacit business model.
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
I think it’s easy for people to contact each other in game and this to get kids to move over to a discord away from moderation. That’s the basic MO the instructor said how “grooming” in Roblox works.
IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)
I once overheard our nine year old explaining to a friend how to lie about their birthdate to create a YouTube account. Age checks are not meaningfully a working thing.
Rotdhizon|8 months ago
Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays.
As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
diggan|8 months ago
Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
Manuel_D|8 months ago
I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
taneq|8 months ago
Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S
jovial_cavalier|8 months ago
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
op00to|8 months ago
superb_dev|8 months ago
bentcorner|8 months ago
charcircuit|8 months ago
ocdtrekkie|8 months ago
cokeandpepsi|8 months ago
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loloquwowndueo|8 months ago
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