Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.

You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.

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 don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.

By his own admission the controls which companies have been pressured to implement thus far are incomplete / can be bypassed.

There is of course only one, complete solution that comes to mind - universal digital ID for all humans on the internet - which is a different kind of nightmare. But we can’t have that conversation because the author won’t stake out their position there.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-...

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.

Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.

Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished.

Nothing changes until bad leaders are punished.

NOTHING CHANGES UNTIL BAD LEADERS ARE PUNISHED.

I'm all ears as to how to get this going.

Does it ask them to buy Robux? Yup, sure does, just like many apps they encounter. IMO it's a learning opportunity.

As far as safety I consider it my job to monitor them when on their devices, be present.

There's no getting around that there's no magic system that will protect kids for sure, other than parental involvement.

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.

It could very well be that I'm being naive, or even stupid, but from what I could see the panic is coming from parents who don't feel like being parents. That is to say, they think the world should be safe for their kids, with no actual responsibility required from them to educate and engage with their own children.

It feels they didn't have shame from the movies I remember watching as I was growing up in the 90s/00s?

I remember this one vividely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4WOo8IJzVg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zD1LM8E-y8

You’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.

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)

it wouldn't be the ugliest problem-reaction-solution history has seen...

Definitely the larger vibe in tech at the moment. Safety is overwhelmingly not a priority, anywhere, to any leader, no matter how loudly specific proponents scream that "ahkshually, it is."

Thing is, I taste the Kool-Aid each company offers. From tiny businesses to a household name SV enterprise, I give each the benefit of the doubt that this time, they're doing things right. This time, they're taking safety seriously. This time, they care about their employees. I really, truly, sincerely tried giving them all the benefit of the doubt that they see things I don't.

After this past forced career change, I finally gave up that exercise in futility. Actions speak infinitely louder than words, and taking stock of the actions of these people reveal their true intentions every time: as much money as possible for them, fuck everyone else.

They play in the lounge and I can keep a bit of an eye on what they're doing.

Most of roblox is a trash fire, but there a couple of games that seem pretty fun when used as an activity for the kids to get together and chat and play.

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).

So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church.

Roblox has a strange demographic problem. Their average user age is around 14. They keep trying to push that up, at least to high school age where there's more spending power. Or so said one of their annual reports. But they just can't retain the early teens into the high school years.

This is the same problem as Chat Control. You let people talk, sometimes they're going to talk about things they're Not Supposed To Talk About. The amount of censorship needed to prevent this goes way beyond Orwell ever dreamed of. Roblox claims a goal of cutting off wrongspeak within 100ms. They're trying pretty hard. That's a concern - an AI listening to everything you say and evaluating it for political correctness.

Kids have been able to access Pornhub, etc. for more than a decade, and not much seems to have happened. Teen sex is down, not up. The graphics in Roblox are so bad that sex there is silly, not obscene, anyway.

This belongs to a long series of non-problems, along with the Hayes Code, the 1950s Congressional hearings on comic books, the Meese Report, and such. Amusingly, we aren't hearing much from the religious right any more; they aligned with MAGA, and now they're stuck defending Trump's sex life.

If anything, the Roblox problem is a subset of the too much screen time problem.

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?

My sons started playing Roblox a month ago. I allow only half an hour time limit, so that they are not get cut from their friends, no friend that they don't know in person and no cent spent for bullshit objects.

Unlimited unattended hovering in Roblox, among others, is recipe for disaster.

Mass abuse of hundreds of millions for profit >>>> minor abuse for sadistic or sexual gratification. It's a true shame that only complaints of the latter have been normalized, but for entirely the wrong reasons punishing "evildoers", rather than preventing harm. When social morals are so warped society becomes unable to protect children which can only hasten the collapse of society.

Punitive justice only seems to work, mainly it relies on people fearing that their harmful actions will be punished, if people believe their actions aren't harmful they will do them and punitive justices' appearance of success disappears.

Need I remind you that the game wouldn't exist without exploiting unpaid child labor? I feel I must, because the only comment of 332 pointing it out has low opacity. Is it any wonder that a software platform designed around exploiting children has users engaging in child exploitation?

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.

This is a great quote and puts to words how viscerally appalled I am at Zuck’s sanctimonious exculpations.

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.

Very Trump-like

Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477

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.

until you find a way to legally tie off-platform behavior, such as on Discord, or the comment sections of a community, back to the platform Roblox itself, all CEOs are going to feel impervious and seem tone-deaf to lawsuits and the media

and it is factually impervious, Roblox' moderation tactics are comprehensive, the legal system goes after the people caught sexually harassing children, the same as how the legal system would go after someone caught sexually harassing children at Chuck E Cheese as opposed to Chuck E Cheese itself or the parking lot outside where the skaters happened to be hanging out

"but it's different and I'm a parent and it makes me uneasy" okay, heard.

CEOs acting like selfish psychopaths indifferent to the suffering of others shouldn't really surprise anyone at this point. Why expect tech CEOs to act differently? Of course he's nothing but annoyed that people keep complaining about how his digital child casino allows pedophiles and corporate advertisers to prey on children without oversight, or about how he's exploiting children for labor, or about how he's psychologically manipulating kids to feel anxiety and FOMO so that he can sell them more Robux. If he were capable of empathy for the victims of his platform he wouldn't have designed his platform to create victims in the first place. He doesn't give a shit about the safety of children, he only cares about himself and how much money he's making.