I have a young, female family member who was preyed on through Roblox. Discord is the next place they take you to and sink their claws in.
My ex’s kid had exactly the same thing happen to him. It started on Roblox then moved to Discord.
It’s gamified social media. Toxic and recommend not letting your kids use this despite strong social pressures.
Roblox needs to dramatically increase moderation, but calling it social media is not true.
It’s a game platform with a chat window in whatever game you are playing like every other online game starting with Doom in 1993.
Doom had chat?
I don’t think there were multiplayer FPSs until Quake in 1996
Both Doom and Duke Nukem had multiplayer before quake came out.
I played MIDI Maze on Atari ST as a kid, that was long before Quake…
Later in high school we played Doom over IPX.
Doom had multiplayer in 1993. It just wasn’t over the internet until WinDoom came along. However, that was still before Quake.
Doom had multiplayer. It didn’t have chat, though.
I’m pretty sure it did. Used to play on an ipx network we setup at work just for it. I even got it working over tcpip using ipx tunneling.
Wiki here says it had chat:
Doom did have text chat, much in the same vein as Quake later on.
However, Doom originally didn’t have TCP/IP, it only supported IPX/SPX networking on LANs. (Though, why use chat when you can yell.) It also supported point to point modem connections, for which the text chat was probably useful. Later versions of Doom and all modern source ports support TCP/IP though.
Ah, I didn’t realize the original Doom had multiplayer. It’s a little hard to search for since now all that shows up is online multiplayer mods for it / source ports that came after
We used to play DOOM multiplayer by connecting two dialup modems and pretending it was a serial link. Worked perfectly.
I had a couple friends and we all used to dial into each others computers after school and play Doom (and Duke Nukem 3D and later Descent which was mind blowing at the time).
It worked just fine, it was a blast.
kids didn’t bully eachother for not playing doom
Imagine being exposed as having a predator problem and doing anything but shutting that down.
I legitimately don’t know what Roblox is except supposedly a game… yet between kids yeeting thousands of dollars into it, becoming an obsessive black hole to them, and a place for predators I can’t help but to ask what kind of nightmare dystopia is it?
It’s basically a social platform + mod making platform + discord wrapped into 1 game, people have remade games like call of duty in roblox.
Can someone give me the out-of-the-loop on Roblox?
I understand that it’s an online gaming platform where there have been accusations of things being unsafe for kids. While bad, this is something that has happened before. Anything specific here that this is in the news so much, or just that it’s the biggest most current example?
The company was recently sued for creating a platform using almost exclusively child labor
The problem is while their target audience is kids, it is heavily monetized and created a market and economy around child created content. It is also impossible to moderate and became a cesspool of predators.
The game itself is comprised of an infinite number of mini games you can try, most of them created by children. Some of them are of a sexual nature and not safe for kids. This makes it really easy for a predator to set up environments where they can groom children.
The players can buy robux with real money and spend this to advertise the games they create, or buy customization items or game passes. They also earn robux when people play their games to incentivize them to create more content. Because of this the company is being sued for essentially child labor, where all their profits revolve around child created games
When I was younger I would also play modded games and create content. I dont think there’s anything wrong with that. But the fact that the game monetized it to such an extent is wrong in my opinion. With the predator problem as well it makes it a really unsafe playform for children. As a parent I would never let my children play this.
Thank you very much! I mentioned it to my oldest son (who is now in his twenties) a couple years ago because my youngest son (who is autistic) seemed like he might be interested in the game. He very emphatically said it wasn’t really what it looked like and that he would not recommend it. I didn’t ask for more details, but I guess I get it!
It’s also used as a recruiting platform by white supremacists.
How did we go from “Mortal Kombat bad!!!” to “white-supremacist pedophiles are good for business,” in 30 years? I hate this fucking world so much.
Industry growth. Turns out it’s a lot easier to “think of the children” when the industry is small and niche than it is when it’s making investors billions of dollars a year. Turns out capitalism makes problems harder to solve once the problem itself makes money (see also: tax preparation)
That’s also why the moral panic people switched from trying to censor games through government to trying to do it via finance (e.g. Collective Shout lobbying banks, credit cards, and payment processors).
Though if your question is about why the contrast between moral panic over game content and the lack of moral panic over actual victimization — I think that’s always been the case, unfortunately. People seem more fearful of their children losing their morals than they are of people with no morals harming their children.
Jesus. How is this thing still a thing? (I guess that’s also part of the answer to my prior question…)
A complete lack of all moderation, an owner / management team who studiously ignores all the child abuse on their platform because it is profitable to them to ignore it, and a legislative and judicial system that is unwilling to prosecute businesses for anything in general and child abuse in particular.
It’s a perfect microcosm of the American condition, really.
https://www.roblox.com/games/1043451322/Shower-Simulator
Content Maturity: N/A
