Them having an office large enough to moderate in-game communications, on every popular language? They have some billions to spare. Serving kids requires a lot of work they have neglected for a very long time.
Facebook was a vehicle for hateful, genocidal messages in Myanmar, and they seemingly got of the hook having no person understanding local language on the market they occupied.
If Roblox primarily targets kids, they can’t go without agressive moderation, psy-help on demand, things one would find obvious, but these are never required, not to say it’s not that sexy as getting profits and cutting corners.
I don’t know if their business model would be viable if they started things right from the beginning, but it would be more stressful to them to finally start doing something about that.
Absolutely! Multiple, in fact. In order of preference:
Shut down the game, dissolve the company, and donate all remaining funds to a women’s shelter.
Prosecute groomers instead of banning and threatening the people who are trying to stop the fuckers and crying about vigilantism even when the proper reporting channels are used.
Use AI for a beneficial purpose at least one goddamn time. Scan the text and voice communications (it’s a public game, there is no expectation of privacy), flag suspicious exchanges for human review, then ban and report groomers.
Honestly, getting rid of any chat (voice/text) and DM features would would help. I don’t think kids should completely lose online gaming, just make it almost impossible to communicate with anyone on said game. I played a shit ton of Mario Kart and Splatoon online as a kid, but neither of those games offer personal messages/chat features (unless you set them up via app), so I imagine grooming would be almost impossible.
I don’t want to take Roblox away from kids, as I understand how fun it was growing up, especially if you can’t afford a console/games at home. But chat has to be either heavily moderated, or just entirely removed imo.
Pretty sure Club Penguin only let you choose from a predetermined list of ready phrases, it worked well afaik. Roblox could do that, but something something engagement
Roblox is making absolute bank. They have the resources to actually solve this if they wanted. They just believe the inevitable slap on the wrist will cost them less than they stand to make in the meantime.
rofl you are beyond a pathetic joke. Congratulations on being a pile of shit so incapable of articulating a point. You are genuinely stupid beyond words.
Doomsider sure explained it better than you did, and he did defend his opinion, which you didn’t. Throwing strawmen arguments and insults around doesn’t do anything to allow meaningful conversations.
If Lemmy was a child’s game and it was full of pedophiles actively grooming them then yes we would need to shut it down. Your analogy misses the point completely.
We’re are dealing with a child’s game where pedophiles are actively going after youth right now as we type.
They should be shutdown and charges pressed against the developers for allowing this. This is the only way forward at this point.
Your point about taking away chat ruining the game is also nonsensical. Only some RP would be affected and could be gotten around easily with a dialogue tree.
Despite being pretty important to the gameplay, should the developers of other games primarily played by underaged people be forced to ban chat? Like other bigger multiplayer games like Fortnite, Among Us, Valorant, CSGO, etc.
Ahh I see your confusion. First of all we are dealing with a specific game used in a specific way.
If culturally pedophiles would do scrabble tournaments for kids then people would react and say we should stop scrabble tournaments because pedophiles have captured them.
This is not saying adults can’t play Scrabble, just that scrabble tournaments run by pedophiles aren’t cool.
Roblox is being used as a similar tool.
Good news is there are lots games like Roblox with better graphics and gameplay that are not infested with pedophiles trying to groom kids.
So you are not being deprived of anything, unless of course you are a pedo that wants to groom kids on Roblox.
I can see where you’re coming from. But calling Roblox a “specific game” isn’t entirely accurate because it’s got millions of separate ones.
Sure, the majority of Roblox players are kids. But iirc about half are adults. It’s not literally 99% kids with the remaining 1% being pedophiles like you suggest.
Removing the chat function entirely isn’t the solution; pedos would just move somewhere else. Maybe all online chat should be restricted to those 18 and older?
Yeah, I totally get Roblox is a huge platform with a lot to offer other than pedos trying to RP with kids.
Personally, after watching my kids play it and seeing a lot of weird stuff like pregnancy, implied sex, possible rape, etc. I felt that without constant supervision it was not safe for them.
I think a dialogue tree for RP when kids are involved would be safer without totally breaking all RP servers.
I like the idea of of restricting all communication to 18+. It is pretty extreme, but I think considering how bad it has gotten it wouldn’t be completely unwarranted.
This. Imagine being a company who suddenly has to do the right thing simply because they can’t afford the “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” approach any more.
Litigation may be an awful substitute for regulation, but at least its having some positive effect here.
Shame about the way they’re doing it, though. It’s a wet dream for politicians and activists in favour of age verification, and for the hackers who’ll inevitability get their hands on all of it.
Not even “can’t afford”. They’re rolling in money. They merely made the calculation that paying lip service to the problem (and farming their user base for even more data to leverage, count on it) could cost less than future lawsuits.
I don’t know if I would call mandatory facial recognition for children online “the right thing.”
I would say it is the parent’s responsibility to know what their child is doing and what platforms their child is using. If something horrible should happen, my first finger to point at would be the parents not doing anything to prevent it, usually out of negligence, not the Roblox company. A company can only do so much before they begin to assume control of responsibilities a parent has, and I would prefer governments and businesses have as little control over raising children as possible.
This is why many parents used to restrict children’s access to the internet to only when the parent can directly monitor it until they were an adult. Sometimes a “family computer” in a common room with the screen plainly visible was the one a child could use. Sadly, it appears this is no longer the case, and more and more parents are ignorant of what their children do.
If someone’s dog eats all the pills they left out on the counter and dies, it isn’t the fault of the dog and it isn’t the fault of the medical company that made the pills, its the fault of the owner for being negligent by not watching the dog and leaving the pills out. This is my opinion.
I don’t know if I would call mandatory facial recognition for children online “the right thing.”
I don’t think so either, which is why I didn’t say it. You skipped my final paragraph.
By “right thing”, I was referring to doing anything, which appears to be more than they’ve tried so far.
The parental responsibility argument was probably valid when there was 1-2 standard computers in a home and getting online was a Whole Thing in itself. Now we have supercomputers in our pockets that are permanently online. It’s a whole lot harder than a simple “parents should take responsibility” one-liner.
I’m not saying they bear no responsibility, but to hand wave that as the answer is not an answer.
Also: Thinking of myself at that age, though public internet didn’t exist until I was almost an adult, I know I’d have found ways around things. A digital equivalent to slipping out of your window to see friends or hiding your Brussels sprouts in a pocket.
The technical education required to correctly protect, monitor and configure the necessary hardware and software is unreasonable for the vast majority of people.
Though you could probably find a kid who’ll happily show you how to do it all…
I don’t agree. I think that the responsibilty a parent has to keep their child safe and teach them how to navigate reality has always been hard.
Parents in the 90s probably had as hard of a time with smartphones as parents do now with smartphones. When smartphones were brand new I remember many parents did not allow their children to have them at all, if the child even had a mobile phone. Not because they don’t love their child, but because they do. They want to protect them from having access to material children shouldn’t have. But children are smart, and they find a way around it with the iPod Touch or PSP that their friend has or other means. But in those cases the parents can say they did everything they could to protect their child.
The most fault obviously lies with the nefarious person grossly mistreating children. If they didn’t exist at all, none of this would even be necessary. Unfortunately, that cannot ever happen, because humans still do not know what causes them to be the way they are, or how to prevent it/treat it properly.
Now, Roblox certainly should be doing something about it, but the amount of fault they have in the issue is the least among other parties. But using mandatory facial recognition for that? I think that is way too far. I don’t see why DMs aren’t monitored. Seems like the perfect use case for AI: have an LLM scan DMs as they are sent and "flag"messages of potential suspicion for a human to then read the DM chain for context to verify. Or just remove messaging from the platform altogether.
I wouldn't be complaining about this, except I am because Roblox is operated by pedos.
Something extreme measures such as face recognition has to be taken to ensure problems like this won't happen again. However, though, pedophiles having access to data storage containing such verifications can go so wrong on so many levels.
So heres what they should do:
Fire and prosecute all of the pedos.
Replace the pedos with trustworthy people to operate Roblox.
Then go through verifying.
I don't get the appeal, really. It's just a lego-looking ripoff where the arms are fucking huge and everything. The things that get chosen to be popular, says a lot about people's collective tastes sometimes.
I think the 2 last points are what really end up making it such a success with kids - low attrition to start and lots of different games in one place. It takes 2 clicks to go from a parkour race to a pet care sim.
When you’re targeting kids, your graphics should be easy to understand. Bright colors, simple shapes, it’s enough. If you think about it, those graphics wouldn’t be too different from what a kid can usually draw.
See, what I figured out is that I don’t have to let my son play Roblox. Sure, he might be the “weird” one who’s dad doesn’t let him. But he was going to be “weird” anyway. That’s just how our lives work.
Plus you have AuADHD, having it myself, it makes you vulnerable to predators in ways you can’t understand yet.
I would happily have more babies as children are fun.
Unfortunately that requires a partner who values intelligence, child development, learning and desires children. When I find such a unicorn I’ll make as many babies as I can reasonably raise (probably like 2 or three more maximum)
We play by the same rule, everyone is weird, no judgement for immutable characteristics. Everyone has challenges, life is already hard, no reason to make it harder for someone.
I don’t allow my kids to play it. It sucks, but the reality is the game has been captured by pedos. I saw too many questionable things when I watched them play. Invariably they will be unsupervised at some point, even for brief periods, so it is not worth the risk.
How are they talking to people? My kid either hasn’t figured it out or doesn’t give a shit. But he doesn’t really talk except for IRL friends on discord.
I came back to Roblox because I was tasked to spy on my brother. Seen shit, reported shit. To be fair, it was probably teens, judging by the behavior, but I really hate Roblox as a company.
Totally sounds like it will only stops kids talking to adults but not adults talking to kids. The creeps already try to get their victims to communicate off-platform using unmoderated services. Unless this blocks the kids’ from seeing the adults’ messages, the adults trying to fuck with kids could just tell them to use a different messenger.
theguardian.com
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