Thankfully my son and his friends have somehow iterated away from Fortnite. It's no longer cool so they just stopped playing it. That's one less thing I have to worry about.
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 into trouble.
https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highes...
https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
She gets along just fine without Roblox.
Roblox is a dystopian nightmare in comparison.
Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
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.
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
His son is eleven. Every Saturday he goes to tennis class. He's good at it, sure, but the important part is that he loves it.
One Saturday, though, he refused to go.
Why? Because there was a special Roblox event happening at the same time.
His father tried reasoning with him, the kid, agrees, a bit reluctantly.
But when the father walks into the bar, he sees a dozen kids all locked to their screens, playing the same Roblox event.
Roblox is an obvious form of manipulation, but honestly, we're not much better. Adults scroll under the influence of algorithmic dopamine loops. If the tobacco class action was once the benchmark for corporate harm, it may someday look tiny compared to what's coming (I hope).
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.
I never said video games are harmful. I talked about manipulation of people of all ages at a planetary scale.
(The moderation problems in the article are clearly a new and separate issue that needs to be dealt with.)
Broadcast TV (UHF/VHF) was exclusive timed events which gave everyone FOMO, at least until the VCR became commonplace and affordable.
That gave you the ability to time-shift, as long as you could figure out how to set your VCR clock.
Roblox is designed from the ground up to sell Robux. Not to promote fun games or anything interesting in the least.
The games are complete brainrot - trying to find servers to get money measured in the billions to spend on rare items to collect to increase the money you earn per second to get more things, etc. And of course if you spend Robux - you can pointlessly accumlate fake billions even faster!
So the games are completely pointless and are nothing like playing Counterstrike or Doom or starcraft at a LAN party.
The events have also caused massive arguments and begging and pleading at my house since Roblox is rarely allowed (and would never be allowed if I had my way...)
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.
Didn't they grow up in an age unrestricted web either? By now we must have two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe World of Warcraft, MSN, Whatsapp and ICQ. Oh and the p0rn... I mean, seriously, do you guys have nothing else to do than to moderate your kids Minecraft servers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Genuinely insane that it's legal. Full dark gambling patterns, insane access. I think the only reason it's not been regulated is that people haven't looked closely, but it's as if someone took the worst of gacha games and decided to base their childrens platform on it.
Roblox is really really weird.
> I am watching YouTubers showing these things for years to the public.
I'm confused, aren't "YouTubers who make videos about the problem" people? They seem to care so much that they've put money, time, and energy into creating videos illustrating the problem.
I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.
This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.
I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"
Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?
That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.
This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.
I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:
Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.
Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-...
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's really interesting to me seeing the debate around age verification from both sides. many Roblox developers and users seems to think that it's the end of the platform:
> Awesome! We love mandatory identity checks and age verification on every major social platform. Nobody needs privacy online. Thank you Roblox.
> No just no. This won’t work, this is too enforcing on the users and greatly invades our privacy
and then on the other side we have people saying it's a token gesture that doesn't go far enough:
> It could have adopted age verification before a wave of state legislation signaled that it would soon become mandatory anyway
my personal view on the matter is that, while age verification certainly reduces privacy, it was basically the only option left for Roblox to pursue - it's a move that absolutely will reduce child abuse on their platforms, and make it safer for kids to play online.
they also have one of the best privacy policies for age verification around.
(for context, they delete facial geometry immediately and store IDs for 30 days maximum. one alternative, Persona, used to hold IDs for up to six years, and currently have no set time limit on how long they keep other personal information)
By trash I basically mean either porn or gambling. By porn I don’t just mean the sexual kind but also political rage porn, etc. By gambling I mean anything that exploits the kinds of dopamine hooks that a slot machine exploits. There are many variations of these things but those are the basic forms.
Those are the kinds of things you get if you optimize for engagement.
You also get more predators and trolls because those are the kinds of people who create the most engaging content.
This isn’t new. It’s been known since mass media was invented. “If it bleeds it leads,” the P.T. Barnum principle of “any publicity is good publicity,” and so on.
What I think is new is the degree of individualized hyper optimization two way digital platforms allow. They let us turn this so far up that apps on a little pocket computer can start rivaling cigarettes for addictive qualities and psychological harm.
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 all for the best and that we should double down on this strategy. Any mention of putting limits on greed and exploitation is met with responses like, “what are you, a socialist?” as if the only two choices for structuring a society are either a rapacious hyper-exploitative capitalism and an oppressive Soviet state, and there’s no other option.
Capitalism needs constraints. Capitalism in the service of society can be a great thing. Capitalism without constraints is a cancer that will destroy everything in the pursuit of profit.
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.
I'd just be happy with one constraint and that is to forbid the crony capitalism that is rampant today.
What is capitalism in service of society?
Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well
I did grow up gambling pogs and MTG cards. I did grow up getting verbally sexually harassed at a Chuck-e-cheese. I did grow up finding my uncle's porno mag collection.
I also did grow up playing Ultima Online with a group of people who knew I was a kid and helped and guided me through some really hard times with compassion.
It's easy to focus on the amplification these platforms have on all the negative parts of our society. And it's a valid criticism . But it also should equally amplify the positive outcomes that occur from finding a community when you live in a bad situation or one with limited positive outcomes.
As usual education is key here and unfortunately our education system (and parents) will never be able to keep up with the pace of advancement. There is no room for nuance or gray areas in our society, everything is too polarized and personal responsibility is non existent.
crazydoggers•1h ago
You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
superkuh•1h ago
That said, I'm with you on reducing the abstraction of liability that is the purpose of corporations. I just don't think parents not parenting is the reason to do it. I also don't really think parents should be thrown in prison and families destroyed. The use of violent force in this situation, against the CEOs or the parents, is entirely uncalled for and does more real damage than the "problem".
jswelker•56m ago
quantified•53m ago
Ajedi32•40m ago
hrimfaxi•52m ago
If someone was selling drugs on the street on the way to school, would we be blaming parents who let their kids walk to school that they should parent better, or would we deal with the drug dealer?
zeroCalories•41m ago
fragmede•33m ago
dylan604•25m ago
We haven't. It keeps happening. Now what?
zzzeek•58m ago
andsoitis•50m ago
This is patently untrue. We are exposed to risk, incl. death, from products and services every day. Nothing can be 100% safe, nor would it be wise to aim for it. The benefits, as they say, often outweigh the cost.
GuinansEyebrows•48m ago
andsoitis•42m ago
Roblox has tens of millions of daily active users. I'm guessing they would say it is a great way to entertain themselves and to spend time with others, amongst others.
iamnothere•46m ago
tyleo•53m ago
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 more pressing to address.
Analemma_•47m ago
dylan604•26m ago
masfuerte•40m ago
But we do! Acute harm is bad but chronic harm is, apparently, fine.
fragmede•38m ago
Isn't that how moralizing about the health benefits of a McDonalds-based diet go?
slightwinder•13m ago
Is sugar in your country restricted? Or meat? I guess alcohol is, as it's everywhere. But restaurants server many harmful food which is only tolerated because harm comes from time and serving-sizes. But the same can be said for dark patterns in software, they are usually not obvious and in your face, but sneaky enough to fly under the parent's attentions.