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

I am watching YouTubers showing these things for years to the public. Somehow people don't really seem to care at all.

Roblox is really really weird.

Tbh making Roblox illegal feels like the same moral panic that our parents had around metal music, hip-hop, and arcades.

My kid plays Roblox, I prevent her from talking to others, and I police the Robux purchases. It really is a fun platform. The problem is for parents that aren't technical, or are negligent and don't know how to police it.

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

I let my kid play Roblox for a couple of weeks and I was absolutely horrified by all the inducements to seek Robux. So I removed it from her iPad, which is locked down.

She gets along just fine without Roblox.

What's wrong with Minecraft? I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but am pretty impressed with how little control they have so far exerted over Java Edition, they even made modding easier recently by removing obfuscation. You can run your own server as much as you want with no fees, obligations or anything. And unless the kids know a server address, they can't easily join some third party server with weird stuff going on. Not that I ever heard of one of those, but I'm sure they must exist.

Roblox is a dystopian nightmare in comparison.

Epic made a deal with Unity, apparently they intend to work around stores by turning Fortnite into a game store.

what have they replaced Fortnite with? more physical play or something digital?

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.

Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.

My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.

I find it weird that you are not DV since the stuff you list here has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people _and_ things have gotten much much worse. The internet is so much more prevalent than it was 15 years ago. The danger is much higher.

The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.

Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.

As other commenters noted, many of them did have practical restrictions (or at least challenges/friction) on what they could see and do online, and came to understand some benefit to that.

Others are among the "two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe [whatever]" who reflect on that experience with concern specifically because they have gone through it and felt like that experience was detrimental to them and deserved more scrutiny and safeguarding. Think of it like parents who had drinking or drug problems in their own childhood, which took them years to overcome, seeking to save their own kids from the trouble and drama of that journey.

Indeed, maybe sometimes either of these groups may go overboard in how they want to address the problems they see, but I don't know if you need to wonder where they came from.

Because the internet is far more optimized at capturing your attention and encouraging terrible behavior (purchases, viruses, scams, etc.)

When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads.

To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.

The internet used to be that forest on the edge of town. Once in a while you might find some drug paraphernalia there. Now it's the Las Vegas strip with billboards for hookers and blow.

My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).

When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").

My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.

Attention maximization algorithms and dark patterns took over between then and now. It’s not the same place.

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Am I the only one who was really underwhelmed? I saw that it was supposedly a very tense trainwreck situation and sure, it gets sarcastic and stuff, but most of it was

Interviewer: "so I heard you were/are doing a bad job with moderation"

CEO: repeats banal PR talking point for the 10th time

Repeat.

I mean, at no point did the CEO say anything interesting about the moderation problem or what they are doing. The interviewers seem too skeptical to be genuinely interested. He explains to them that cost =/= quality and that 2016 =/= 2025 for what feels like an eternity. I was bored.

I do legit wonder about K abuse in this whole crowd.

Anyone hear any excerpts from Thiel’s Antichrist lectures? I’ve never been on the same page as him politically but this wasn’t “wow I really disagree” material. This was “are you… okay, man?” material. It was just askew and bizarre. I’m not a big Thunberg fan either but I cannot replicate the thought process that would lead to mentioning her as a potential Antichrist prototype. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing, just the easiest to explain.

One thing I learned way back in college: if someone seems like they are on drugs, they may be on drugs.

Either that or these guys are in some weird echo chambers.

it usually devolves into a mess of a comments section because it's about freedom vs. control / moral panic vs. apathy.

Same as it always was. Reminds me of Tipper Gore with the panic to put explicit lyrics labels on records.

> 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.

I don't really think that culture has existed lately, it kind of died out with the 2008 financial crisis. Now it's about naked use of power, whether political or economic.

The problem with constraints on individual freedom (which is essentially what happens when you constrain capitalism) is that no one agrees on what they should be, and therefore a segment of society will not be happy with them, and claim them as tyrannical oppression. Sometimes this is hysterical nonsense, sometimes it has a point.

Ultimately the antidote to unfettered capitalism is sensible policy crafted through political compromise. But largely Western politics itself has skewed towards extremes lately, few have the patience or understanding for this process, they want a quick fix.

> Capitalism needs constraints.

I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.

It's hyper individualism that is fueling this type of capitalism, the notion that you owe nothing to anyone and other people in society are not your concern, society itself is not your concern, it’s only about what you want etc. It's like a pond, if you follow hyper individualism, you will extract as many fish from the pond as you can, without caring what happens next or others using the pond, and the fish will not be able to reproduce for future generations, others will not be able to get as many fish as they need etc. It needs to be balanced. As you say, there is something in between that can work, we do not need to choose only between extremes.

I don't think any actual socialist would ever argue for an oppressive Soviet state either. They'd want stuff like public firefighters, health care, sewage, roads, etc.

What is capitalism in service of society?

If humans were much more rational this would work better.

The human brain is loaded with exploits, and capitalism being an excellent optimizer quickly finds and uses these exploits. Because they work, and more importantly they are way way easier than creating actual value.

A casino is more profitable than a hospital. Quack medicine sold with sensationalism is more profitable than real medicine. Porn is more profitable than good film or literature. Rage inducing click bait is more profitable than actual news or thoughtful editorial. It’s kind of just thermodynamics. These things require less energy input, and they don’t have to “work” because they exploit security vulnerabilities in the dopamine system instead.

We are hacking each other to death.

How is this different from a LAN party? I spent countless hours engrossed in DOOM deathmatches and Starcraft games as a kid. I don’t really see the difference.

The problem outlined in the article is about moderation of spaces where kids are present. You seem to be trying to draw some broader conclusion that video games are harmful.

Adults definitely do this too.

I bet adult tennis instructors get a lot of cancellations on Super Bowl Sunday. In certain circles, you're going to have a hard time scheduling a screen-free dinner party on Oscar night, or opposite the finale of a hit TV show.

How dare this child be excited for a special event in his game!