Roblox has been on a constant downward trend. They’ve been doing some pretty awful stuff, including exploitation of children developers [0], unregulated market which encourages kids to gamble, lackluster moderation allowing kids to be harassed or worse, [both 1] and allowing manipulative and predatory games on their site [2].
That's a pretty extreme interpretation. Anyone who downloads the IDE can create and publish a game. If kids are using the tool, making fun games, and sharing them with other people, than I think that's a good thing.
Roblox is making money off various sorts of in-app purchases, but you can make an account for free, you can play games for free, and you can create games for free. It's not much of a nefarious plot.
I do agree that “exploitation” is a bit of an extreme take, but it isn’t an innocent business either. Hosting and profiting from a platform/marketplace for social content creation has, and will, trend toward preferences for viral, controversy-generating, and addictive content. Profit-sharing incentives to creators are meager but drive incredible lock-in behavior.
Children are wielding powerful content creation tools on TikTok and YouTube as well. And for every feel-good story about self-made young creators, there are thousands more telling of addiction, depression and anxiety for those caught in these spiraling for-profit walled gardens.
I’m all for teaching kids to be coders and makers, but I’m not sure Roblox is the poster child for it.
The ability to do many things for free does not excuse the exploitation any time sales are involved.
You gloss over it as "making money off various sorts of in-app purchases", but roblox taxes a massive cut of transactions between users (more than half), on top of large upfront fees, and then pays out robux at 28-35% of what it costs to buy them.
> That's a pretty extreme interpretation. Anyone who downloads the IDE can create and publish a game. If kids are using the tool, making fun games, and sharing them with other people, than I think that's a good thing.
as someone that grew up on roblox (i.e. has been playing semi-consistently for ~11 years, since elementary school), insofar as any of that is true, none of it is new.
If anything, the robux -> profit conversion rate was much worse back in the day (iirc engaging in it at all necessitated purchasing the highest subscription level, the now-defunct `Outrageous Builders Club'), and it was far more common for kids to waste their parents' money on `limiteds'.
the most widely-implemented roblox cheat feature (short of actual lua execution) was a button that would reskin you and another player to naked tones, then teleport their model to a doggystyle position. we used to sit around during sleepovers and scroll the catalog looking for games titled [18+ s3x rp] to mess around in.
on the flip side, fiddling with .rblx studio taught me lua and rudimentary 3D modeling at a ludicrously young age, and I made similar online acquaintances who went on to do very well with their learned skills.
They got the userbase and importantly took a massive amount of money at a multibillion dollar valuation, but now have to monetize so the product will get worse until the userbase goes away. It really is a Ponzi scheme all the way down
I wonder if my pi-hole setup will work to remove those ads like it does all the annoying and sometimes dangerous android in-app ads my son used to have to put up with.
Still annoyed with Roblox for blocking the Linux (wine) version from working so I have to use my phone to play now. Yes I play Roblox at 45, I get to interact with the kid and keep an eye on what he's doing. Still prefer Minecraft though..
Got to get them hooked early. Probably some studies that indicate product promotion to kids at this age will have a high affinity or loyalty later in life. )
(Pumping the 2034 quarterly numbers)
This comment seems is fairly disconnected from the reality of what the average kid experience these days. Television, Youtube, Hulu, Peacock, TikTok [1], gaming consoles, and the vast majority of iPhone and android games are all full of ads. 80% of kids have access to tablets/phones [2].
We shouldn't have to have ads everywhere. Ad-free societies can exist. Granted, the only one I've seen do it successfully was North Korea, and if that's what's required to get rid of ads, maybe it's not worth it... But man, videos of people just walking around in the city are crazy. Not an ad up anywhere, not a billboard on the skyline, not a logo on a building. Just that aspect of a complete lack of ads seems very peaceful.
> Ad-free societies can exist. Granted, the only one I've seen do it successfully was North Korea,
I don't think you could call North Korea ad free when it's wall to wall propaganda. Just because there's only one "product" allowed to advertise, that doesn't mean people aren't being constantly manipulated by advertising.
It's crazy the extent to which targeted ads have been normalized as "a part of life"... to the point where we have people defending targeting children, with "Well they get targeted with ads elsewhere, too." We are in one of the more terrible universes in the multiverse.
The crazier twist is that a good majority of the people on this site depend on targeted ads for their livelihoods, with a reasonable portion directly contributing to the number of ads.
It is crazy that mobile devices have some fucked up ad ID. An operating system you can trust would shield you from receiving any ad in everyway possible and treat it as the malware that it is.
iOS allows blocking ad ID [1] and advertisers hate it [2].
> If you choose Ask App Not to Track, the app developer can’t access the system advertising identifier (IDFA), which is often used to track. The app is also not permitted to track your activity using other information that identifies you or your device, like your email address.
No one is teaching kids how to handle ads. There's no class at every level of schooling devoted to how advertisers are manipulating you. The schools themselves are often directly responsible for shoving ads at children far too young to have any defenses against it. Meanwhile ad companies pay for experiments on children to learn how to most effectively influence them. Fun fact, children as young as three can recognize brands https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/even-3-year-old-k...
Reality: ads are a fundamental of US commerce that kids will see.
(Assuming >= 8 yo or so) With this reality, I think reducing ads, but also getting them to understand ads, is a better approach than a silly dream of never letting them see an ad.
It's pretty easy to approach this positively, to help them learn. You make a game of pointing out the manipulation, have them identify it, and they learn to see them for what they are. You can do the same for news, where they (very) quickly learn to identify half truths, lying by omission, etc. Kids are pretty great at this sort of thing.
I personally think kids should know that people are often trying to trick them. But, that's something they'll eventually figure out it, with your help or not.
Right, it should have been "teaching everyone how to handle ads" would be more appropriate. Adults including those on this site get taken by ads more than they would probably like to admit (if they are even aware there's something to admit).
This is just another step of "think of the children"
honestly, as a parent, you should be having these conversations with your kids. it is a very sad reality that your kids have a greater than zero chance of being involved in a school shooting.
seriously, this place sometimes thinking everything in the world is the happy path. you have to be prepared for and have an ability to handle exceptions. we can't catch/throw our way through life. teaching kids to learn when someone is trying to manipulate them is not a bad thing. this place seems to think things are someone else's problems, but at some point, you have to realize there is no EU style legislation that will protect you from everything.
How about we have a Purge Day against marketers, advertisers, sales teams, greedy shareholders, and anyone who actively enshittifies every single aspect of life? How about we normalize that instead? Because as brutal as it is, maybe sociopaths wouldn't sociopath if there were real risks to their life and limb incited by their being pieces of shit. :)
> The company in November began testing the video ads — that will be served to users who are 13 years and older
Maybe by kids you meant 13-17...but I feel like teenagers are not exactly a demographic that never sees targeted ads (e.g. through social media, on YouTube, etc.).
(Full disclosure, I work for Roblox, but not on anything related to ads. Obviously representing just myself and not my employer.)
> I feel like teenagers are not exactly a demographic that never sees targeted ads
That is definitely true, but my opinion would be that they need "less ads", and not "more". That's a phase of life when most people are very suseptible to societal messaging, and form their self-image (partly?) based on it.
Not all ads are created 100% equal of course, so one can only hope these ads are nice to the users.
Cable TV programming, by which I mean deciding what is broadcast on what channel when, has long (decades) been a question of identifying the audience for the ads coming in, working out what they want to see, showing it, and billing the advertiser. You may even create whole new channels for this target group. Most consumers get it backwards thinking ads exist to fund channels - channels only exist to show you ads.
Even back in around 2000 in the UK satellite market (which relied on modems in STBs phoning home as the backchannel) the granularity and segmentation of the data backing this was amazing. Unsurprisingly the people I knew in that universe went on to build the current web ad universe.
> identifying the audience for the ads coming in, working out what they want to see, showing it, and billing the advertiser. You may even create whole new channels for this target group.
That's broad targeting. Miles away from hypertargeting/surveillance.
> back in around 2000 in the UK satellite market (which relied on modems in STBs phoning home as the backchannel)
Do you really need to be an ass instead of just saying yes or no with some proof?
For most of the existence of cable, there was no way for it to send a signal back. It is not fundamentally based on tracking. The targeting you described in detail is not tracking.
I mean you simply went off showing you don’t know what you are talking about, then ask a stupidly basic question and when it gets the snarky answer it warranted claim the other person is an ass?
My bigger point was that cable didn't have that for most of that time, and you're ignoring that to nitpick one line. The answer to that question doesn't affect the rest of my comment. It doesn't show I don't know what I'm talking about, you're just being rude.
Especially since the correct answer is probably "some of them". I was hoping you could be more specific, since you're doing your best to give an impression of knowledge but not doing much to share it.
And your store loyalty remark was objectively being an ass, that comment adds no value to the conversation at all.
Why would I make the store loyalty remark? Because it is clear you are underestimating things you don’t know. Why would I think that? Because the cable people were targeting individuals and had the mechanisms and data to back it up. The satellite comment shows that _even_ the satellite people were doing this in spite of their disadvantages.
There is a distinct tendency on forums like this to believe if something isn’t widely discussed on the internet then it didn’t happen.
You should stop assuming the worst and being so obnoxious.
> You should stop assuming the worst and being so obnoxious.
You don't think this applies to the store loyalty comment?
I'm not surprised, I wanted specifics instead of implications, jesus. I'm not saying anything "didn't happen", unless you're claiming cable had universal tracking from the start, in the 50s.
And
AGAIN
That doesn't affect my main point, which you keep ignoring.
You ignoring my main argument is far more obnoxious than anything I'm doing.
> That's broad targeting. Miles away from hypertargeting/surveillance.
This is just wrong. You are misinterpreting what I'm saying to mean what you want it to say and not what it does say, then getting confused, angry and demanding answers. It's not a winning strategy.
EDIT: in the spirit of generosity I will add a detail you seem to be missing: those target groups can be very very very very small indeed.
> This is just wrong. You are misinterpreting what I'm saying to mean what you want it to say and not what it does say, then getting confused, angry and demanding answers. It's not a winning strategy.
For my main point, I just wanted you to address it at all, whether you agree or disagree, I wasn't demanding answers.
The thing I wanted an answer for was a separate point, which you laser-focused on to mock and not answer. That's not a winning strategy either. And I wouldn't be upset if you didn't want to bother with it very much, but you don't get to just mock it and say nothing else if you're trying to actually have a conversation.
> EDIT: in the spirit of generosity I will add a detail you seem to be missing: those target groups can be very very very very small indeed.
If you make an entire channel, it is not very very very very small!
Unless you're talking about something very different from traditional channels, which again follows my point that it didn't work that way for decades, and satellite didn't have the bandwidth to do that.
When I look at my monthly video entertainment spend vs a cable bill from my childhood (let alone what it would be today), the quality and options available and the control over scheduling I have vs linear television, I’m not feeling very swindled.
Wasn't it way worse than that? While it may be a bit sensational, "Casinos for children built with child labour who were paid in company scrip" isn't a technically inaccurate description of Roblox.
Most games don't use real money to buy in. So it doesn't describe them in the same way.
"Scrip" here is something that takes real effort to get, and is sort of money, but rips you off when you use it. Not something completely unconnected to the real world.
Roblox maybe advertising to kids very aggressively. Recently a redditor claimed that this was their child's assigned homework (https://i.redd.it/6o2r9jazhoxc1.jpeg)
I refuse to let my kids play Roblox. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy ...". That place is full of kids scamming each other, and I've not heard many good things about the company either. I was once trying to tell my child about this in a public setting, and a nearby older kid was just smirking knowingly about all the things I was talking about. Gambling, theft, foul language. Frankly, it almost seems like a good playground for older kids to learn some cheap life lessons from, but I'm not sure what age one can partake of some of these things without it warping your personality.
We use Roblox for family game night. It might not be as bad as you think.
I think its a cool platform for burgeoning game developers. Anyone can publish a game, we put together a little obby just for the fun of it. We're back to the days where a couple of creative, motivated people can make a fun game, share it with people, and possibly make a pile of money.
We don't _need_ anything for family game night but Roblox won out of all the choices. Take a chance sometime and play 'epic mini games'. It's like a mini-arcade where we can all play together.
How do you partake in the real world without it warping your personality? Being scammed of your virtual items is not that different to being scammed of real money once you are an adult. Growing up with multiplayer games, Roblox can be categorized as an immersive sim with a virtual adult world inside of it that can teach kids a great deal about life. I myself got interested in money from Runescape, where I was scammed and scammed others. Since you brought an example I have my own, I ended a friendship over Runescape because I trusted my friend and he stole all my items. I cried for a week but then I moved on and learned to identify bad actors. You choose to shelter your kid, and that's okay because you are the parent.
> How do you partake in the real world without it warping your personality?
You can't, but what you can do is try to understand where your cognitive biases are, learn the ways advertisers manipulate you and accept that knowing about those techniques do not make them ineffective, actively search for ways you've already been manipulated by advertising, work to develop your critical thinking skills, and above all understand that your children have zero defenses against advertising and that they are specifically and aggressively targeted by advertisers for that reason.
Children should be protected from as much advertising as humanly possible for as long as humanly possible and you should start teaching them about the fact that they are being lied to and manipulated by advertising as soon as possible and help them to develop some of the skills that might help them, however much of that will be literally impossible for them until their minds are more developed. You child can recognize and form preferences for brands long before they learn to identify ads when they see them.
I mean, the logical extreme is to let them hang out in an opium den... I'm pretty sure that will likely have some pretty extreme psychological repercussions. I can tell you from personal experience, letting a young child watch some graphic movies can cause enough damage to probably need therapy. Knowing what experiences is age appropriate is a very important job for a parent, and each child is very different. And for the record, I tend to feel we over shelter our children as a society.
But you are very correct with your experience with Runescape, I can only guess at the age you got into it. I certainly would have loved the game in my mid teens, and it would have been a good playground. I'll likely be keeping an eye out for similar playgrounds as my kids get older. I do want them to have some of the villainy experience in settings where the consequences are small to none. Do it too young, that is where the warping tends to happen.
I've made a couple games with my kids, and these types of comments are very confusing to me. Roblox is a storefront for user made games. There's no single experience. Is this in reference to the "loot box" style mechanics that some games use?
It's in reference to the need to spend money and buy things in the game to enjoy the game. Roblox isn't unique in that way, but it's still strange to me.
I seem to recall targeted advertisements for breakfast cereals and toys. Was it atrocious? Maybe, but it was old way before I was born. I'm shocked that people are shocked.
Just had an atrocious vision where you get in your self driving car, select destination, sit back in your seat... and the car starts showing you full windscreen ads (you don't need to look out after all).
[0] https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?si=Cwfswyot9_FT29Fy
[1] https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY?si=MbT71UNeO0vEPSrr
[2] https://youtu.be/cGAXGroHZKA?si=mlCDY02aUXaJ9EPQ