It's a nightmare managing all this stuff. Roblox, Minecraft, Meta Quest services, Fortnite, the list goes on and on. These companies are not helping us either.
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 want to share a small story a close friend told me.
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).
I'll probably get DV to oblivion for this, but I have to constantly wonder where those parents come from that need to forbid their children to roam freely on the internet.
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?
I looked at Roblox recently as a nostalgia trip as I was active in the community over a decade ago when I was a kid.
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.
There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord.
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.
Yeah that was a little cringe. Once he starts laying out on the sarcasm thick you tell he's pissed. He runs one of the biggest games out there and the audience is majority children and they have been in the news a lot for not doing enough to protect their kids that play their game.
I'm more shocked he's been around in the industry for 20 years and still hasn't learned media discipline. All he had to do was be a little empathetic and explain how they were doing everything they can do keep kids safe. Would have just been another run of the mill CEO interview.
disclaimer: slightly biased as i've made USD from Roblox
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)
I’ve come to see this as a general rule: trash maximizes engagement.
By trash I basically mean either porn or gambling. By porn I don’t just mean the sexual kind but also political rage porn, etc. By gambling I mean anything that exploits the kinds of dopamine hooks that a slot machine exploits. There are many variations of these things but those are the basic forms.
Those are the kinds of things you get if you optimize for engagement.
You also get more predators and trolls because those are the kinds of people who create the most engaging content.
This isn’t new. It’s been known since mass media was invented. “If it bleeds it leads,” the P.T. Barnum principle of “any publicity is good publicity,” and so on.
What I think is new is the degree of individualized hyper optimization two way digital platforms allow. They let us turn this so far up that apps on a little pocket computer can start rivaling cigarettes for addictive qualities and psychological harm.
We have a culture where we’ve been told for decades that market forces and the profit motive are sufficient for running a society. That the market will find a way to give everyone what they need efficiently without problems.
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.
We need to stop painting with the wide brush of "capitalism" like this.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
Parents do need to be more involved in keeping kids off this stuff. But it is going to be a lot easier to coerce a handful of exploitative companies to clean up their acts than to coerce millions of individuals parents to do better.
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.
I think the primary issue is that there is massive demand for adolescent social interaction in a world that is increasingly physically isolating for kids.
Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.
I was surprised to see a children's game is publicly traded. So there is no real incentive to protect children, just max extract as much money as possible.
I check out my kids screen every so often to see what what he's really up to. After the panic of recent weeks, I looked more closely at Roblox, and spoke to my kid about it.
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.
Anyone not thinking it's that bad, watch the following. Here's a single example of a perpatrator that got away with it for too long. He admits to "contacting four to five children every day for the past year."
What a strange video. Showing full faces of not just the 17 year old guy who was asking for naughty pictures of 15 year olds but for some reason also his father and brother. And they talk to him without a lawyer present? And all this is published even before the first court hearing?
I have 10 year old twin boys, they play roblox with their friends from school, and they have a lot of fun. Importantly though they don't use the in-game chat, they fire up a group voice call on messenger kids and chat to each other through that while playing their games.
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.
It's interesting to me to think about a possible system where people in say roblox can only chat with each other by exchanging physical keys somehow. This way, they would be able to chat with their peers from school etc., without the danger or need for as much supervision.
I don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Isn’t this just called “having a discord server” or even a group text? If you only want to talk with people you know outside the game, you don’t need the game to facilitate that.
> Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
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.
> Since 2018, at least two dozen people in the United States have been arrested and accused of abducting or abusing victims they met on Roblox, according to a 2024 investigation by Bloomberg.
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.
57 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 60.5 ms ] threadYou’d quickly see these “impossible to moderate” platforms quickly clean up.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-...
I'm more shocked he's been around in the industry for 20 years and still hasn't learned media discipline. All he had to do was be a little empathetic and explain how they were doing everything they can do keep kids safe. Would have just been another run of the mill CEO interview.
it's really interesting to me seeing the debate around age verification from both sides. many Roblox developers and users seems to think that it's the end of the platform:
> Awesome! We love mandatory identity checks and age verification on every major social platform. Nobody needs privacy online. Thank you Roblox.
> No just no. This won’t work, this is too enforcing on the users and greatly invades our privacy
and then on the other side we have people saying it's a token gesture that doesn't go far enough:
> It could have adopted age verification before a wave of state legislation signaled that it would soon become mandatory anyway
my personal view on the matter is that, while age verification certainly reduces privacy, it was basically the only option left for Roblox to pursue - it's a move that absolutely will reduce child abuse on their platforms, and make it safer for kids to play online.
they also have one of the best privacy policies for age verification around.
(for context, they delete facial geometry immediately and store IDs for 30 days maximum. one alternative, Persona, used to hold IDs for up to six years, and currently have no set time limit on how long they keep other personal information)
By trash I basically mean either porn or gambling. By porn I don’t just mean the sexual kind but also political rage porn, etc. By gambling I mean anything that exploits the kinds of dopamine hooks that a slot machine exploits. There are many variations of these things but those are the basic forms.
Those are the kinds of things you get if you optimize for engagement.
You also get more predators and trolls because those are the kinds of people who create the most engaging content.
This isn’t new. It’s been known since mass media was invented. “If it bleeds it leads,” the P.T. Barnum principle of “any publicity is good publicity,” and so on.
What I think is new is the degree of individualized hyper optimization two way digital platforms allow. They let us turn this so far up that apps on a little pocket computer can start rivaling cigarettes for addictive qualities and psychological harm.
We’ve dispensed with ethics as a basis for human interaction, and the results are exactly what one would expect: a dystopia.
And the people making the most money off this system insist that it’s all for the best and that we should double down on this strategy. Any mention of putting limits on greed and exploitation is met with responses like, “what are you, a socialist?” as if the only two choices for structuring a society are either a rapacious hyper-exploitative capitalism and an oppressive Soviet state, and there’s no other option.
Capitalism needs constraints. Capitalism in the service of society can be a great thing. Capitalism without constraints is a cancer that will destroy everything in the pursuit of profit.
This is not capitalism vs socialism. You are describing neoliberalism.
A good place to start is the Wendy Brown book Undoing the Demos. The subtitle is "Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution"
There is no way to change and fight back against something when we are so confused what we are even fighting against.
No one is really against market prices. They are against these insane, distorted, neoliberal ideas that apply the efficient market hypothesis, "the market is always right" to non-markets. Or using the efficient market hypothesis as a pseudoscientific moral justification for bad behavior.
Most importantly is that there are a ton of people that actually believe this bullshit.
If a process causes number to go up then the process must be morally good because "the market is always right". Obviously, if the process was morally bad number go down because "the market is always right". This is the 21st century American religion.
Railing against "capitalism" just causes those hypnotized by neoliberalism to completely tune out before you even get to the ism in "capitalism".
Roblox CEO interview about child safety didn't go well
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013477
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.
Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zD1LM8E-y8
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.
I don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.
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.
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.