The "child safety measures" was dividing the playerbase into age groups and banning almost all communication between them. The age groups are under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+. Users only speak to other players ±1 age group, so 18-20 can speak to 16-17 or 21+.
The problem is almost every game on Roblox is social and the matchmaking isn't mature enough to ensure players in a lobby can all communicate.
My favourite is "generic roleplay gaem". The main fun is inciting riots against the leader or forming alliances to do raids. I could join a game and within half-an-hour I'd be engaged in drama, since Roblox incentivizes ephemeral lobbies with random people meaning I don't need a lengthy time commitment to form an alliance.
But I can no longer do that because I am 25 years old and the lobbies are too young. Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic. But the matchmaking system literally makes that impossible.
I've had the same Roblox account for 18 years and have spent tens of thousands of Robux on the platform. I let Roblox scan my passport even, so they know who I am. Even though I own nearly 1000 Steam games, Roblox still filled my desire for low-commitment social games I could jump into on my phone or computer if I had a few hours of downtime. Now it is effectively unplayable.
I'm in favour of child safety. But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
> these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform
I see these as orthogonal issues.
Your mathmaking gripe sounds legitimate, and is probably driven by Roblox's low 21+ user numbers. That would be expected to change over time. At the same time, I'm not seeing a great argument for why these folks (EDIT: Roblox) should continue to have unfettered access to kids under 14.
Roblox is absolutely torching their platform, in many ways besides matchmaking and the age verification. Ask any kid who's grown up with the game. Players are leaving in droves and Roblox has become quite un-cool in the last six or so months.
As someone who dislikes predator havens that are combined with addictive dark patterns honed to maximize children begging parents for Robux (or just stealing parents’ credit cards to get it) I couldn’t be happier to see Roblox collapse.
I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
> I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
Hopefully not, it feels like regulation is catching up with the child exploitation. Once the giant platforms are dismantled and can no longer bully governments it will be easier to keep the smaller ones in check.
And no, "dark web Roblox" isn't going to be a replacement. Not matter how much the existing exploiters try to make it a scare tactic.
No, it doesn't. Not long time ago a microblogginf platform run by a billionaire introduced an easy way to "virtually undress" real kids.
Outrage ensued, owner showed the middle finger to everyone, moved the undressing part behind a paywall.
Site is still supported by payment processors, still hosts accounts of all the major preas/government/NGO organisations.
There are some token actions from some governments but absolutely nothing that would happen of it was someone poorer running this site -- for example 4chan fights CSAM (as I understand), yet British Ofcom tries to issue a fine against them.
With Twitter generating CSAM though? Ofcom still have their account there.
Well it’s different when someone is powerful enough that an entity trying to level a fine or shut down those systems will likely be shut down themselves
If communication was proactively filtered to prevent bad actors (which Roblox obviously failed to do for years), why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
> why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
My main problem is the kid is playing a game with significant social-media (and gambling) components. That's orthogonal to the question of who is playing with whom, which I agree, is theoretically solvable with better filters.
The real predators are Roblox for getting kids addicted to gambling and the lawmakers who refuse to protect them.
Not that they haven't also abdicated responsibility for keeping sexual predators off the platform. But the societal-level harm is going to be these kids growing up, hardwired to these dopamine-addled gambling pathways. Every single one of those kids has been twisted by Robux.
We need regulations to stop targeting kids with this shit. Companies will stop building it when they get regulated.
Roblox is effectively a casino for kids with more social elements than in adult casinos. The corporation failed to prevent children from rapists for decades. Why would any rational person trust them to implement either proactive communication filters or to even allow something so close to gambling amongst different age groups?
Roblox doesn’t deserve to be a business and I hope the lawsuits and equity markets solve that in a hurry.
This seems like a very reasonable system to ensure e.g. you and your classmate/friends can still interact as you grow up and switch age brackets. I wonder how families etc deal with it though? Can you play with your younger sibling/cousin? Is there some sort of parental approval/override?
We have 18-year olds in high school in America. The headline risk from a 40-something sleeping with a high-school student is probably something Roblox wants to get ahead of.
They could fix this by lowering the drinking age. Not by raising it. If you have two years of experience being drunk and then start driving you know exactly what you are in for.
If you’ve been confidently driving for years and then suddenly pair that with alcohol… complete opposite effect.
Also it would increase illegal transfer of alcohol to underage peers, in theory. But high school kids who want beer have no major problems getting already.
It’s up to each state, but the federal government threatens funding if they get out of line.
Seems like they should have raised the driving age. Also, having taken a driving exam in NA and EU, NA is laughably easy. So not a surprise that drivers are unprepared, especially young ones.
Just a point of clarity (because I read that at first as well), they spent tens of thousands of robux, which are at a generic level 100:$1. So not as crazy as it sounds, still an investment.
I think you need to stop assuming people know things like the value of Robux or what OBC is if you want to communicate with normal people about this stuff.
It doesn't seem surprising me they started playing at 7, and they were playing the game in 2008. I definitely recall the game taking off a good bit with little kids around that time. By like 2010 or so I knew of a ton of little kids who were at least aware of the game if they didn't play it themselves.
You're not the only one. Im not sure how, but I didnt learn of Roblox's existence until at least 5 years after I learned about Minecraft. It somehow existed entirely outside of my social sphere, and I was an always online gamer.
Yeah, I had to go check this too. Not that I ever played either game, but I definitely recall Roblox being the knock-off version of Minecraft. It's wild checking the wikipedia entry for both and realising how much later Minecraft came out.
> But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
As a parent, my experience in discussion with other parents is: "Don't ever let your child onto Roblox, it is utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs."
From that perspective, I think most parents view the destruction of the platform as neutral to positive, and it suggests that the status quo would destroy the platform anyway.
This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?
They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.
My 9 year old got verified as 21+ somehow. He obviously doesn’t have a photo id, so there is no way to verify him as a child. Support refused to help. The whole system is insane.
Exactly, but it's pretty clear adults can work around the automatic assignment (being adult makes you much better at figuring out how to fool such profiling systems). And the verification with ID is only good for proving that you're old, i.e. to keep kids out of adult spaces. It's no good for keeping adults out of kids spaces.
nothing at all, because it's PR security theatre done out of desperation as their platform has been gradually revealed to be a machine that destroys children's lives
One thing is sure: if they can be fooled, adults will figure out a way to fool it. (Young enough children might not, but that doesn't help security). And once they're in, their child victims and their parents will be all the more likely to assume they're a child.
Or perhaps you’ve aged out of a game that is primarily meant to be a place for children. The child safety measures make things more difficult for you because nobody wants you there. And it seems to be working as designed. Maybe it’s time to find a new game that’s more for your age group.
Roblox isn't a game, it's a platform. It has hundreds of millions of monthly users. A significant portion of those are 18+. And unsurprisingly there's plenty of games that target older audiences.
This is quite like saying that because you’ve “aged out” of high school, you must be suddenly cut off from interacting with all the friends you made in high school
IRL, you stay in touch with some of those old high school friends for years.
I don’t know if it’s the Roblox system deliberately trying to prevent players from maintaining contact outside the game with their friends? Or maybe just that the players haven’t foreseen the need to be ready for the abrupt cut in communication on their next birthday? (Happy Birthday!)
Sounds like a serious strategic error by Roblox though.
You’re unlikely to convince an adult of that age who has willingly spent 10s of thousands of dollars on a children’s game that they maybe shouldn’t be playing it.
Basically, the game takes place in a medieval walled settlement. The person who's on the server the longest becomes the "leader" and gets to tax everyone/manage the settlement/build stuff. This is extremely profitable.
If the leader dies, the next person in line becomes the leader. Players can also buy swords and weapons.
This means the goal of the game, if you're ambitious, is gain power instead of actually contributing to the settlement. You could directly murder the leaders, but this is slow.
It is more efficient to incite an angry mob and make everyone extremely violent. Then leaders will get repeatedly murdered by the mob as the settlement burns down/devolves into chaos.
Unfortunately, everyone else wants power too. You'll take power and get killed by the angry mob you created.
Being toxic in an emulation of the late Roman Empire is essentially the game.
This comment itself comes across as so toxic, ironically - as if it’s somehow wrong to want to blow off steam in a way that isn’t appropriate for a nine year old to experience personally.
Edit: I swear it seems like infantilizing everyone is suddenly a goal for some reason. This has to be the most annoying personality type on the internet.
Your comment is blowing something out of proportions. He prefers 25+, said so. Toxic in there means "F u", get a "F u and u'r mother" back and both persons laughs after. It's not toxic in the sense of "I will kill you and your entire family", but more like venting something in a safe space. You don't go in real life to a random stranger and say "F u", but in a lobby of a virtual game that's acceptable. And he's saying he prefer that since also going to a lobby full of 9 years old kids and saying that is way more toxic and he prefers the algorithm to actually match him with appropriate ones instead of throwing him in young lobbies and then cannot be able to speak with them. So clearly the algorithm is half baked, made communications worse and needs more tuning. Swearing is part of any culture in humanity, and there is a reason the among the first things you learn in a foreign language is swearing. Used wisely, that "toxicity" is actually a great tool to forge good relations.
Roblox's introduction of mandatory face verification to chat is one of the most biggest examples of how people in tech can get so deep in trying to create a solid technical solution, that they completely miss the human problems it creates.
You could create the best possible face verification system that processes everything completely locally, uses CPU security features to make sure the photos stay exactly where they're supposed to, etc etc. You could design the best possible chat age segregation system that makes sure nobody can ever get groomed over chat again. You can get so deep that you forget you're forcing children to take pictures of themselves, and fail to consider the wider effects this will have on the safety of those kids in general.
How's Jimmy supposed to know that taking a picture of himself for roblox.com is okay, but taking a picture for somescamwebsite that he found in a Roblox game is absolutely not okay? This solution creates a much worse problem. Sane parenting would tell kids to never take pictures of themselves or put it on any website, but now we're clearly shifting the role of parenting to tech companies and we are going to see bad consequences of this.
Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on. Parents could rely on vendors to make devices where it’s easy to set appropriate locks, and rely on stores not to sell unlocked devices to kids.
But we don’t live in that world.
Also, the are trying to prevent adults from pretending to be kids, which is much harder than preventing kids from accessing adult sites.
> Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on
Yes, for people who live from selling tech, it is ideal when parents have to buy a separate device for everyone. But for people who do not live from selling tech, they prefer one or two tablets for the whole family, you know it is cheaper.
And being cheap is one of reasons for roblox popularity. Kids could have play it without buying anything (except that tablet).
This feels like a bit of a reach. It's not really clear that adding face scanning as a blocker for chat makes anyone more likely to fall for scams. These hypotethical god tier engineers should just make scam prevention software in addition to face scanning anyway?
If 11-year-old Jimmy is anything like I was a lifetime ago (in terms of understanding tech), he knows how to ask an LLM to take his picture and make him look like he's 18... and none of it matters anyways.
Investors are hilarious. What’s better: more investment in child safety measures so that a company remains a long term product that parents allow their children on, or no safety measures to increase profit so that parents stop letting their kids be on the platform, thereby killing long term viability of the product?
Quarterly thinking is the bane of the health of corporate America.
In this case, "child safety measures" includes not just "stopping child predators," but also "not letting kids use their parents' credit card to buy $500 of Robux" and "not letting underage users buy lootboxes, aka gambling".
It's completely understandable that the company, which profits off children, putting in measures making it harder to profit off children, would lower both its long and short-term valuations.
They're not really choosing to do that though. They are completely beholden to the out of sight conversation weekly with Apple that led to changes in how users can spend - especially funds that Apple gets less of a cut of, like Robux gift cards.
Another POV is that Roblox is overvalued and it's just a matter of time before the fragility of its business, which is being a time waster for kids, falls apart like everything else in that space.
Markets are future discounting machines. A stock price does not reflect the current economic reality, but rather the present-day anticipation of how that company will perform in the future. Adding more friction to user experience and onboarding seems like a legitmate concern for retention and growth. The collective thinks this won't be good for future earnings, and I'd be curious to hear why you think otherwise.
Actually, myopic market has provided me plenty of opportunities and has served as a great wealth building force for myself.
But setting that aside, my perspective was mostly around capital allocation from investors. Yes on a personal level you can make more money by investing companies, hollowing them out for profit, and fleeing before the company fails, like a lot of PE does. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing for the company or for the investor themselves on a long enough time horizon.
Or perhaps the investors know that the child safety measures will actually harm the product because the harm to children is a significant part of their product/profit
"While our aggressive push to enhance safety lowers our expectations for topline growth in 2026, it makes our platform fundamentally better and amplifies the long-term growth potential of Roblox through more effective content targeting, tailored communication experiences, and improved community sentiment," the company wrote in its letter to shareholders.
Man, I watched a couple segments of their people being interviewed (Creative Director, IIRC) and I have to agree with you, actual ghouls in sheep clothing.
The Internet Comment etiquette episode on Roblox Is both hilarious and so concerning.
"According to the company, 73% of age-checked daily active users on Roblox were under 18, with 35% under 13 as of Jan. 31."
The story under the story seems to be Roblox has lost plausible deniability.
With increasing–and, in my view, inevitable–calls for age gating social media, these data mean between a third and three quarters of Roblox's users could soon be banned from monetisation or banned entirely from their platform.
> Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
Yes, this reduces the TAM of companies like Roblox in the near term. Countries should collectively regulate how much big tech can exploit minors. Minors cannot go to casinos, and the underlying gamification techniques for creating addiction are the same. Children are not some demographic to maximize for profits. If they aren't educated and raised correctly, a society collapses in less than 40 years.
If one is a psychopath and needs an analogy rather than "harming childrens' mental development for profit is morally and ethically evil": this is essential the same as setting catch quotas on fisheries, to maximize long term value at the expense of short term profit.
Regardless of Roblox’s continued failings I strongly believe that there needs to be a safe, scrutinized, and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways. As much as we would rather discontinue social media for minors the fact remains that for millions of Americans the internet provides a primary means of social fulfillment, especially in gaming, which is far more popular among youth demographics.
I think Roblox themselves have a chance in the coming years to prove themselves this space. They have one of the greatest chances to create this space precisely due to the intense scrutiny they’re currently under. It’s honestly that or fold basically. And if it’s not Roblox, what other platform do we trust our children on?
There have absolutely been growing pains since I regularly played games on the platform in ‘09-‘13 but I also credit Roblox extremely heavily in my journey as a software engineer making social games for me and my friends. It fostered that curiosity in a frankly healthy way for a young nerd that has eventually culminated in a job at FAANG and great academic fulfillment. I hope they can continue to provide this for millions of more children, just in a safer and healthier way.
> and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways.
What benefits will this bring over an offline platform for children to socialize in? I'm not denying that there would be any, but, if we determine what those are directly, perhaps we can find better mechanisms than bespoke "social media" platforms to deliver them.
> I think Roblox themselves have a chance
It'd probably be a good start to subtract things like "virtual currency" from whatever implementation is imagined.
Children were online long before Roblox. They’ll be online regardless, let’s give them an actually safe space. I’d argue their platform is still better than Xbox live or msn chats
Fully agree on the currency aspect. I feel like since they’ve IPOd the company has taken more of a playing focus in where it was previously building and creating.
Roblox is genuinely digging its own grave, the brainrot games made a huge chunk of its playerbase leave, then after the schlepp situation, added all that age verification stuff, and then most of the kids left too. Now there is just a fraction of its original players left playing.
This is the second time in the last month that Hindenburgh's reports appear to be prophetic. Previously, they called out Backblaze before the company began harming its own product.
Hindenberg's 2024 report titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids": https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
And I assume this[1] is the reference to Backblaze? Notably not Hindenburg and more recent, but I believe there is some team overlap and there doesn't seem to be anything else.
I wouldn't connect those things too closely, nor to the broader legislative efforts to ban pornography and monitor everyone's messages. Roblox has been a special hell of predatory interactions for a very long time now, and the walls may finally be coming down...
This is far more reaching than just Roblox, essentially all forms of online access where kids ("kids" most often being defined 15 and under) can hangout and communicate are rapidly being restricted. Facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat, whatsapp, discord, roblox, fortnite, steam, etc.
Obviously some companies have sketchier pasts and are feeling the pressure more, but this is a very broad trend of restricting online access and communication.
Most of the companies you've listed have been horrible at keeping kids safe - they simply don't care. I'm all for kids communicating and having fun, but we have to actually want to create safe ways to do both.
It’s abrupt only if you are unaware of safety challenges and issues in children’s gaming in the past decade.
Moderating user generated games is a kafkaesque joke. It’s not just text, audio, or video. It’s all of those combined in an interactive environment which can include trigger conditions - and one category of games is escaping from mazes.
Since it’s kids, you will end up with maps based on actual schools, combined with violence, on your mod que.
The list of horrifying stuff that happens frequently is quite long, and it’s unfortunate how unaware most people seem to be about it.
School maps, takes me back, I made them back in the day myself. Fact is kids spend so much time at school and it’s their social life as well. Of course in my day it was made by kids for kids, not by grooming adults.
Yeah Nintendo is the same as Disney Toontown 20 years ago. It makes it basically impossible to form social bonds.
My bigger point is there are increasingly very few spaces for teenagers to socialize and interact (and at least in the US, very few offline), and what sort of long-term ramifications this is going to have. If the net outcome of this is kids return to playing outside and unfettered access to parks and neighborhoods as far as their bikes will take them, I think that's great, but I suspect those will also continue to be heavily locked down.
Prior to stocks we had feudal lords created out of vast private land holdings. Stocks at least abstract ownership out into a more democratic mechanism. The notion is sound but the current implementation is incomplete, for the same reason the prior innovations were, the initial uninformed creation become too easily corrupted.
There was a time 5-10 years ago where Roblox was going on a ex-FAANG hiring spree and folks on Blind were pulling in insane salaries (probably still pay amazing).. but to work for fucking Roblox. Truly a "these are not my people" moment.
Roblox made a platform. The people on that platform used it for making gambling and child grooming.
I guess the worst you can say for roblox is that it incentivizes that with the way they’re selling Robux, but that’s also the only way their platform can work.
It's a parenting problem and parents say they need help so... what next? HN tends to say nah, SOL, parent harder, never pass any laws you have no power because of privacy (money) or something.
> I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
Valve is a very interesting example to use here, I don't think of them as a game company anymore. They run Steam but I can't remember the last game they actually released?
Half life alyx and their push for openVR has made a big impact in that part of the gaming world.
But yeah, their games are just as filled with lootbox, crates, skin garbage as other low effort money grabs; saving grace being its all cosmetics only (and they’re private about their financials).
The "child safety measures" was dividing the playerbase into age groups and banning almost all communication between them. The age groups are under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+. Users only speak to other players ±1 age group, so 18-20 can speak to 16-17 or 21+.
The problem is almost every game on Roblox is social and the matchmaking isn't mature enough to ensure players in a lobby can all communicate.
My favourite is "generic roleplay gaem". The main fun is inciting riots against the leader or forming alliances to do raids. I could join a game and within half-an-hour I'd be engaged in drama, since Roblox incentivizes ephemeral lobbies with random people meaning I don't need a lengthy time commitment to form an alliance.
But I can no longer do that because I am 25 years old and the lobbies are too young. Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic. But the matchmaking system literally makes that impossible.
I've had the same Roblox account for 18 years and have spent tens of thousands of Robux on the platform. I let Roblox scan my passport even, so they know who I am. Even though I own nearly 1000 Steam games, Roblox still filled my desire for low-commitment social games I could jump into on my phone or computer if I had a few hours of downtime. Now it is effectively unplayable.
I'm in favour of child safety. But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
> these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform
I see these as orthogonal issues.
Your mathmaking gripe sounds legitimate, and is probably driven by Roblox's low 21+ user numbers. That would be expected to change over time. At the same time, I'm not seeing a great argument for why these folks (EDIT: Roblox) should continue to have unfettered access to kids under 14.
Roblox is absolutely torching their platform, in many ways besides matchmaking and the age verification. Ask any kid who's grown up with the game. Players are leaving in droves and Roblox has become quite un-cool in the last six or so months.
As someone who dislikes predator havens that are combined with addictive dark patterns honed to maximize children begging parents for Robux (or just stealing parents’ credit cards to get it) I couldn’t be happier to see Roblox collapse.
I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
> I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
Hopefully not, it feels like regulation is catching up with the child exploitation. Once the giant platforms are dismantled and can no longer bully governments it will be easier to keep the smaller ones in check.
And no, "dark web Roblox" isn't going to be a replacement. Not matter how much the existing exploiters try to make it a scare tactic.
No, it doesn't. Not long time ago a microblogginf platform run by a billionaire introduced an easy way to "virtually undress" real kids.
Outrage ensued, owner showed the middle finger to everyone, moved the undressing part behind a paywall.
Site is still supported by payment processors, still hosts accounts of all the major preas/government/NGO organisations.
There are some token actions from some governments but absolutely nothing that would happen of it was someone poorer running this site -- for example 4chan fights CSAM (as I understand), yet British Ofcom tries to issue a fine against them.
With Twitter generating CSAM though? Ofcom still have their account there.
Well it’s different when someone is powerful enough that an entity trying to level a fine or shut down those systems will likely be shut down themselves
Poor 4chan
I can tell you right now that any kid that’s growing up with the platform right now couldn’t care less.
They don’t communicate in chat. They communicate by shouting at each other from 2 feet away.
> Ask any kid who's grown up with the game.
I don’t have a kid who’s grown up with Roblox nearby to ask. Can you please explain what you mean?
“thing that was cool to kids is not cool anymore” is not a new phenomenon, and the onus is really on you to show the causation.
My son has played it for the last 3 years and this rings really true. He spends a lot of time dissing the CEO saying he's ruining it.
If communication was proactively filtered to prevent bad actors (which Roblox obviously failed to do for years), why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
> why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
My main problem is the kid is playing a game with significant social-media (and gambling) components. That's orthogonal to the question of who is playing with whom, which I agree, is theoretically solvable with better filters.
Oh, I misunderstood. When you said "these folks" I assumed you meant older users, as opposed to Roblox corporation. Cool we're in agreement.
There’s a large risk and hugely adversarial nature/motivation for predators to bypass whatever proactive filtering is put in place.
The real predators are Roblox for getting kids addicted to gambling and the lawmakers who refuse to protect them.
Not that they haven't also abdicated responsibility for keeping sexual predators off the platform. But the societal-level harm is going to be these kids growing up, hardwired to these dopamine-addled gambling pathways. Every single one of those kids has been twisted by Robux.
We need regulations to stop targeting kids with this shit. Companies will stop building it when they get regulated.
Roblox is effectively a casino for kids with more social elements than in adult casinos. The corporation failed to prevent children from rapists for decades. Why would any rational person trust them to implement either proactive communication filters or to even allow something so close to gambling amongst different age groups?
Roblox doesn’t deserve to be a business and I hope the lawsuits and equity markets solve that in a hurry.
Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+? Aren't they all adult or in some countries children develop slower?
They aren't:
> Users only speak to other players ±1 age group
I.e., 18-20 can speak to 16-17 AND 21+, but 21+ can only speak to 18+
This seems like a very reasonable system to ensure e.g. you and your classmate/friends can still interact as you grow up and switch age brackets. I wonder how families etc deal with it though? Can you play with your younger sibling/cousin? Is there some sort of parental approval/override?
I can play with my kids but we're not allowed to talk. They're not allowed to talk with each other as well.
This sucks big time, and it will even more, because we soon won't be aple to play together at all: https://thenextweb.com/news/roblox-age-gated-account-tiers-k...
The last time (that I remember) people wanted to talk in a game, but could not teamspeak showed up.
You can still play with those outside your age groups, you just can’t communicate.
US drinking age probably being used as a proxy for "adult-ness".
> Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+?
We have 18-year olds in high school in America. The headline risk from a 40-something sleeping with a high-school student is probably something Roblox wants to get ahead of.
Yes but an 18yo can also buy a gun, get drafted into the military, and produce OF/porn.
But no alcohol.
That’s just a US quirk. In many countries you can buy alcohol when you’re 18+.
It’s odd that you can do everything but drink. Like you can go to work, drive home to your wife and kids, but can’t have a beer lol.
> That’s just a US quirk
My understanding is it’s because of car culture. Drunk-driving deaths drove up the drinking age [1].
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Why-Is-the-US-Drinking-Age-...
They could fix this by lowering the drinking age. Not by raising it. If you have two years of experience being drunk and then start driving you know exactly what you are in for.
If you’ve been confidently driving for years and then suddenly pair that with alcohol… complete opposite effect.
Also it would increase illegal transfer of alcohol to underage peers, in theory. But high school kids who want beer have no major problems getting already.
It’s up to each state, but the federal government threatens funding if they get out of line.
Seems like they should have raised the driving age. Also, having taken a driving exam in NA and EU, NA is laughably easy. So not a surprise that drivers are unprepared, especially young ones.
It’s hard in many transit-desert communities to get around without a car, heck where I lived the DL age was 15.
Sure. What does that have to do with Roblox?
They can drink, just not publicly.
Depends on the state. In some, even children under 18 can drink in a bar if their parents buy (I think Wisconsin).
And its not all the US at 21 to buy, in Puerto Rico you can buy alcohol at 18. Federally all those are legal at 18.
States that do not comply get 8% less transportation funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_.... Funding is obviously more important than those between the age of 18-20 being able to drink alcohol.
These same men (18-20) would be the first to drafted to go die for the politicians enabling these laws.
You've had your Roblox account for 18 years? Wtf, I could've sworn that game was released 4 years ago!
Thanks for making me feel old I guess.
Don’t forget the part where GP says they’re 25 years old (currently) and have spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on the platform.
Just a point of clarity (because I read that at first as well), they spent tens of thousands of robux, which are at a generic level 100:$1. So not as crazy as it sounds, still an investment.
My parents bought me lifetime OBC over a decade ago instead of an XBOX. I get 2200 Robux/month in passive income.
I think you need to stop assuming people know things like the value of Robux or what OBC is if you want to communicate with normal people about this stuff.
It doesn't seem surprising me they started playing at 7, and they were playing the game in 2008. I definitely recall the game taking off a good bit with little kids around that time. By like 2010 or so I knew of a ton of little kids who were at least aware of the game if they didn't play it themselves.
Game has been around for almost 20 years now.
Roblox is older than Minecraft...
Why do I remember learning about Minecraft way earlier than learning about Roblox?
You're not the only one. Im not sure how, but I didnt learn of Roblox's existence until at least 5 years after I learned about Minecraft. It somehow existed entirely outside of my social sphere, and I was an always online gamer.
Yeah, I had to go check this too. Not that I ever played either game, but I definitely recall Roblox being the knock-off version of Minecraft. It's wild checking the wikipedia entry for both and realising how much later Minecraft came out.
> But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
As a parent, my experience in discussion with other parents is: "Don't ever let your child onto Roblox, it is utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs."
From that perspective, I think most parents view the destruction of the platform as neutral to positive, and it suggests that the status quo would destroy the platform anyway.
Which parents do you talk with? The consensus around me seems to be that it’s fine as long as whatever you do on there is done with RL friends.
Most parents dont mind kids playing roblox games at all.
This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?
They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.
My 9 year old got verified as 21+ somehow. He obviously doesn’t have a photo id, so there is no way to verify him as a child. Support refused to help. The whole system is insane.
Exactly, but it's pretty clear adults can work around the automatic assignment (being adult makes you much better at figuring out how to fool such profiling systems). And the verification with ID is only good for proving that you're old, i.e. to keep kids out of adult spaces. It's no good for keeping adults out of kids spaces.
What’s to stop a 40 year old from holding up a photo of their 15 year old self for the age verification camera?
nothing at all, because it's PR security theatre done out of desperation as their platform has been gradually revealed to be a machine that destroys children's lives
It's a interactive prompt needing a webcam. You move your head to prove it is a live face.
I've seen a video of someone getting verified by drawing a face on a thumb.
It was fake
I've seen people getting verified by using a video game character creation screen. How can these AI systems possibly tell?
One thing is sure: if they can be fooled, adults will figure out a way to fool it. (Young enough children might not, but that doesn't help security). And once they're in, their child victims and their parents will be all the more likely to assume they're a child.
Or perhaps you’ve aged out of a game that is primarily meant to be a place for children. The child safety measures make things more difficult for you because nobody wants you there. And it seems to be working as designed. Maybe it’s time to find a new game that’s more for your age group.
LOL, they literally said they want to play with other 18+ players alone. Without kids in the lobby, at all.
What are you, fun police? What's next, ban on bright coloured clothes?
You'd be surprised to know the sheer number of "experiences" and games people have created on roblox as the platform.
There are fps shooting games that are more playable/mature than your yearly call of duty/battlefield and all kinds of games for older age groups.
In that sense it's probably hard to "age out of it".
There’s a whole bunch of Roblox experiences clearly designed for adults. There’s dozens of us xD
I’m not sure if I’d say it’s better or worse, the games are higher quality because they need to be to keep an older adience engaged.
Roblox isn't a game, it's a platform. It has hundreds of millions of monthly users. A significant portion of those are 18+. And unsurprisingly there's plenty of games that target older audiences.
This is quite like saying that because you’ve “aged out” of high school, you must be suddenly cut off from interacting with all the friends you made in high school
IRL, you stay in touch with some of those old high school friends for years.
I don’t know if it’s the Roblox system deliberately trying to prevent players from maintaining contact outside the game with their friends? Or maybe just that the players haven’t foreseen the need to be ready for the abrupt cut in communication on their next birthday? (Happy Birthday!)
Sounds like a serious strategic error by Roblox though.
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You’re unlikely to convince an adult of that age who has willingly spent 10s of thousands of dollars on a children’s game that they maybe shouldn’t be playing it.
Tens of thousands of robux. That's hundreds of dollars, reasonable for a long term player.
Ask me what I’ve spent on a League of Legends account I can no longer even use. My wallet weeps.
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> Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic.
Perhaps reexamine why you find it preferable to "be more toxic"
Basically, the game takes place in a medieval walled settlement. The person who's on the server the longest becomes the "leader" and gets to tax everyone/manage the settlement/build stuff. This is extremely profitable.
If the leader dies, the next person in line becomes the leader. Players can also buy swords and weapons.
This means the goal of the game, if you're ambitious, is gain power instead of actually contributing to the settlement. You could directly murder the leaders, but this is slow.
It is more efficient to incite an angry mob and make everyone extremely violent. Then leaders will get repeatedly murdered by the mob as the settlement burns down/devolves into chaos.
Unfortunately, everyone else wants power too. You'll take power and get killed by the angry mob you created.
Being toxic in an emulation of the late Roman Empire is essentially the game.
https://www.roblox.com/games/4598019433/generic-roleplay-gae...
I want to invoke my inner Catullus and insult my enemies but I am limited in what I can say in the presence of minors.
This comment itself comes across as so toxic, ironically - as if it’s somehow wrong to want to blow off steam in a way that isn’t appropriate for a nine year old to experience personally.
Edit: I swear it seems like infantilizing everyone is suddenly a goal for some reason. This has to be the most annoying personality type on the internet.
So adults having innocent fun together and perhaps "cussing" while in strictly 28+ game are somehow problematic to you? :D
Your comment is blowing something out of proportions. He prefers 25+, said so. Toxic in there means "F u", get a "F u and u'r mother" back and both persons laughs after. It's not toxic in the sense of "I will kill you and your entire family", but more like venting something in a safe space. You don't go in real life to a random stranger and say "F u", but in a lobby of a virtual game that's acceptable. And he's saying he prefer that since also going to a lobby full of 9 years old kids and saying that is way more toxic and he prefers the algorithm to actually match him with appropriate ones instead of throwing him in young lobbies and then cannot be able to speak with them. So clearly the algorithm is half baked, made communications worse and needs more tuning. Swearing is part of any culture in humanity, and there is a reason the among the first things you learn in a foreign language is swearing. Used wisely, that "toxicity" is actually a great tool to forge good relations.
Roblox's introduction of mandatory face verification to chat is one of the most biggest examples of how people in tech can get so deep in trying to create a solid technical solution, that they completely miss the human problems it creates.
You could create the best possible face verification system that processes everything completely locally, uses CPU security features to make sure the photos stay exactly where they're supposed to, etc etc. You could design the best possible chat age segregation system that makes sure nobody can ever get groomed over chat again. You can get so deep that you forget you're forcing children to take pictures of themselves, and fail to consider the wider effects this will have on the safety of those kids in general.
How's Jimmy supposed to know that taking a picture of himself for roblox.com is okay, but taking a picture for somescamwebsite that he found in a Roblox game is absolutely not okay? This solution creates a much worse problem. Sane parenting would tell kids to never take pictures of themselves or put it on any website, but now we're clearly shifting the role of parenting to tech companies and we are going to see bad consequences of this.
Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on. Parents could rely on vendors to make devices where it’s easy to set appropriate locks, and rely on stores not to sell unlocked devices to kids.
But we don’t live in that world.
Also, the are trying to prevent adults from pretending to be kids, which is much harder than preventing kids from accessing adult sites.
This is an interesting comment because there’s a parallel effort to shift age verification to devices, which draws a lot of hate here.
Because almost universally it's not an privacy-preserving age verification, but permanently deanonyming identification.
Please, let's keep it accurate.
> permanently deanonyming identification
As is showing your ID to a bartender.
Bartender forgets my name the moment I put my ID away. He doesn't write it down to sell it later to the advertisers.
That is temporary deanonyming identification. Bartender is pretty much guaranteed to forget in 10 minutes.
> Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on
Yes, for people who live from selling tech, it is ideal when parents have to buy a separate device for everyone. But for people who do not live from selling tech, they prefer one or two tablets for the whole family, you know it is cheaper.
And being cheap is one of reasons for roblox popularity. Kids could have play it without buying anything (except that tablet).
This feels like a bit of a reach. It's not really clear that adding face scanning as a blocker for chat makes anyone more likely to fall for scams. These hypotethical god tier engineers should just make scam prevention software in addition to face scanning anyway?
If 11-year-old Jimmy is anything like I was a lifetime ago (in terms of understanding tech), he knows how to ask an LLM to take his picture and make him look like he's 18... and none of it matters anyways.
Investors are hilarious. What’s better: more investment in child safety measures so that a company remains a long term product that parents allow their children on, or no safety measures to increase profit so that parents stop letting their kids be on the platform, thereby killing long term viability of the product?
Quarterly thinking is the bane of the health of corporate America.
In this case, "child safety measures" includes not just "stopping child predators," but also "not letting kids use their parents' credit card to buy $500 of Robux" and "not letting underage users buy lootboxes, aka gambling".
It's completely understandable that the company, which profits off children, putting in measures making it harder to profit off children, would lower both its long and short-term valuations.
They're not really choosing to do that though. They are completely beholden to the out of sight conversation weekly with Apple that led to changes in how users can spend - especially funds that Apple gets less of a cut of, like Robux gift cards.
Another POV is that Roblox is overvalued and it's just a matter of time before the fragility of its business, which is being a time waster for kids, falls apart like everything else in that space.
Markets are future discounting machines. A stock price does not reflect the current economic reality, but rather the present-day anticipation of how that company will perform in the future. Adding more friction to user experience and onboarding seems like a legitmate concern for retention and growth. The collective thinks this won't be good for future earnings, and I'd be curious to hear why you think otherwise.
So are you buying Roblox hand over fist? Didn't think so.
It's easy to talk big, it's hard to beat the supposedly stupid, myopic market.
Actually, myopic market has provided me plenty of opportunities and has served as a great wealth building force for myself.
But setting that aside, my perspective was mostly around capital allocation from investors. Yes on a personal level you can make more money by investing companies, hollowing them out for profit, and fleeing before the company fails, like a lot of PE does. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing for the company or for the investor themselves on a long enough time horizon.
It's not even quarterly thinking, it's castles in the sky speculation about what the market thinks the market will react to.
Possible that there aren't measures that will actually achieve long-term safety while maintaining a highly popular platform?
Or perhaps the investors know that the child safety measures will actually harm the product because the harm to children is a significant part of their product/profit
Those profits, if they happen, will be delayed, so it means they aren't worth quite as much.
That interview of their CEO with the NYT from last year was insane. If you've never seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIXRgMlPo4
> interview of their CEO with the NYT
Do you have a source from the New York Times? (EDIT: Nvm.)
Second EDIT: the CEO reminds me of the energy vampire from What We Do in the Shadows.
It’s time for me to re-read MOMO by Michael Ende.
Maybe they edited their comment after you saw it, but they included a link to a video from the NYT YouTube channel.
That video is from the New York Times official account.
Oh whoops, didn't recognize the Hard Fork brand. My bad.
Man, I watched a couple segments of their people being interviewed (Creative Director, IIRC) and I have to agree with you, actual ghouls in sheep clothing.
The Internet Comment etiquette episode on Roblox Is both hilarious and so concerning.
https://youtu.be/ROG5V0tSuA0?si=iHjWlBy1dE1NtlsK
Just about anything can be claimed to maximize shareholder profits in the long term. This is an illustrative example of how it's done.
Whether it actually turns out that way is another question.
They have to head off the investor whos going to ask "is child safety bullish?"
"According to the company, 73% of age-checked daily active users on Roblox were under 18, with 35% under 13 as of Jan. 31."
The story under the story seems to be Roblox has lost plausible deniability.
With increasing–and, in my view, inevitable–calls for age gating social media, these data mean between a third and three quarters of Roblox's users could soon be banned from monetisation or banned entirely from their platform.
Don't you have it backwards?
Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
> Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
Joe Camel [3] was also intended for children.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-most-mass-voters-su...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Camel
Yes, this reduces the TAM of companies like Roblox in the near term. Countries should collectively regulate how much big tech can exploit minors. Minors cannot go to casinos, and the underlying gamification techniques for creating addiction are the same. Children are not some demographic to maximize for profits. If they aren't educated and raised correctly, a society collapses in less than 40 years.
If one is a psychopath and needs an analogy rather than "harming childrens' mental development for profit is morally and ethically evil": this is essential the same as setting catch quotas on fisheries, to maximize long term value at the expense of short term profit.
Roblox has long been known as a pedo farm, and talks with friends actually with kids all know it, so I don't know how it's still even around.
Because any social hotspot for children is going to be a pedophile farm. Its around because its popular, which is the same reason its a pedo farm.
>"Before founding Roblox, he hosted a libertarian talk radio show for KSCO Radio Santa Cruz"
I am Jacks lack of surprise.
Regardless of Roblox’s continued failings I strongly believe that there needs to be a safe, scrutinized, and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways. As much as we would rather discontinue social media for minors the fact remains that for millions of Americans the internet provides a primary means of social fulfillment, especially in gaming, which is far more popular among youth demographics.
I think Roblox themselves have a chance in the coming years to prove themselves this space. They have one of the greatest chances to create this space precisely due to the intense scrutiny they’re currently under. It’s honestly that or fold basically. And if it’s not Roblox, what other platform do we trust our children on?
There have absolutely been growing pains since I regularly played games on the platform in ‘09-‘13 but I also credit Roblox extremely heavily in my journey as a software engineer making social games for me and my friends. It fostered that curiosity in a frankly healthy way for a young nerd that has eventually culminated in a job at FAANG and great academic fulfillment. I hope they can continue to provide this for millions of more children, just in a safer and healthier way.
> and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways.
What benefits will this bring over an offline platform for children to socialize in? I'm not denying that there would be any, but, if we determine what those are directly, perhaps we can find better mechanisms than bespoke "social media" platforms to deliver them.
> I think Roblox themselves have a chance
It'd probably be a good start to subtract things like "virtual currency" from whatever implementation is imagined.
Children were online long before Roblox. They’ll be online regardless, let’s give them an actually safe space. I’d argue their platform is still better than Xbox live or msn chats
Fully agree on the currency aspect. I feel like since they’ve IPOd the company has taken more of a playing focus in where it was previously building and creating.
Roblox is genuinely digging its own grave, the brainrot games made a huge chunk of its playerbase leave, then after the schlepp situation, added all that age verification stuff, and then most of the kids left too. Now there is just a fraction of its original players left playing.
This is the second time in the last month that Hindenburgh's reports appear to be prophetic. Previously, they called out Backblaze before the company began harming its own product.
Hindenberg's 2024 report titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids": https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
And I assume this[1] is the reference to Backblaze? Notably not Hindenburg and more recent, but I believe there is some team overlap and there doesn't seem to be anything else.
[1]: https://www.morpheus-research.com/backblaze/
More safety = less sales, got it, nothing to worry about here, parents.
The market valuates Roblox child abuse at almost a billion dollars?
Funny how the world abruptly decided kids shouldn't have social interactions online right as AI chatbots took off.
I wouldn't connect those things too closely, nor to the broader legislative efforts to ban pornography and monitor everyone's messages. Roblox has been a special hell of predatory interactions for a very long time now, and the walls may finally be coming down...
This is far more reaching than just Roblox, essentially all forms of online access where kids ("kids" most often being defined 15 and under) can hangout and communicate are rapidly being restricted. Facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat, whatsapp, discord, roblox, fortnite, steam, etc.
Obviously some companies have sketchier pasts and are feeling the pressure more, but this is a very broad trend of restricting online access and communication.
Most of the companies you've listed have been horrible at keeping kids safe - they simply don't care. I'm all for kids communicating and having fun, but we have to actually want to create safe ways to do both.
It's only with AI that user created content can be graded for age appropriateness/political inconvenience as it's uploaded to platforms in real-time.
It’s abrupt only if you are unaware of safety challenges and issues in children’s gaming in the past decade.
Moderating user generated games is a kafkaesque joke. It’s not just text, audio, or video. It’s all of those combined in an interactive environment which can include trigger conditions - and one category of games is escaping from mazes.
Since it’s kids, you will end up with maps based on actual schools, combined with violence, on your mod que.
The list of horrifying stuff that happens frequently is quite long, and it’s unfortunate how unaware most people seem to be about it.
At least so many people wouldn’t be surprised.
School maps, takes me back, I made them back in the day myself. Fact is kids spend so much time at school and it’s their social life as well. Of course in my day it was made by kids for kids, not by grooming adults.
Have a look how Nintendo do it. Their communications between players was (is?) very limited.
Yeah Nintendo is the same as Disney Toontown 20 years ago. It makes it basically impossible to form social bonds.
My bigger point is there are increasingly very few spaces for teenagers to socialize and interact (and at least in the US, very few offline), and what sort of long-term ramifications this is going to have. If the net outcome of this is kids return to playing outside and unfettered access to parks and neighborhoods as far as their bikes will take them, I think that's great, but I suspect those will also continue to be heavily locked down.
What's heavily locked down?
Helicopter parenting trends over the past 20-30 years that extend until the kid is 18+.
Child well-being being inversely correlated with stock price is very much a nice summary of the times we live in.
I think human wellbeing has been inverted with stock price basically since stocks were introduced.
Prior to stocks we had feudal lords created out of vast private land holdings. Stocks at least abstract ownership out into a more democratic mechanism. The notion is sound but the current implementation is incomplete, for the same reason the prior innovations were, the initial uninformed creation become too easily corrupted.
There was a time 5-10 years ago where Roblox was going on a ex-FAANG hiring spree and folks on Blind were pulling in insane salaries (probably still pay amazing).. but to work for fucking Roblox. Truly a "these are not my people" moment.
God forbid people want to work on video game stuff instead of for an advertising company.
Video games is one thing. Roblox is something else.
Yeah, but for Roblox? That’s child gambling and child grooming.
Might still be a step up from Facebook.
Roblox made a platform. The people on that platform used it for making gambling and child grooming.
I guess the worst you can say for roblox is that it incentivizes that with the way they’re selling Robux, but that’s also the only way their platform can work.
I don’t think that’s a defence in the slightest.
Roblox is open buffet for pedos for YEARS.
These corporations don't give a sh...
Only thing you can do is to petition your lawmakers to ban whole platform.
Safety measures will always be a joke. Open chat/voice chat, "Hi, connect to my discord" -> all safety measures bypassed.
But at the end of the day, this a parenting problem.
It's a parenting problem and parents say they need help so... what next? HN tends to say nah, SOL, parent harder, never pass any laws you have no power because of privacy (money) or something.
It's not harder though. You have to do things to get your kid on Roblox. You have to do nothing to not get your kid on Roblox.
Peak HN childless digital nomad comment.
Good.
I am curious why does Roblox even exist?
This shouldn’t even be a business, let alone a public company.
I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
> I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
Valve is a very interesting example to use here, I don't think of them as a game company anymore. They run Steam but I can't remember the last game they actually released?
Technically it's not released yet but deadlock has 75k people playing as of writing this comment.
https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/charts/
Half life alyx and their push for openVR has made a big impact in that part of the gaming world.
But yeah, their games are just as filled with lootbox, crates, skin garbage as other low effort money grabs; saving grace being its all cosmetics only (and they’re private about their financials).