True, moderation was never perfect...

But nowadays no one is even trying.

The methods that all of most of those places ... learned they needed to develop and implement?

Basically that has all been forgotten now, skimped on.

Its ... really easy, to develop a kid themed game or app, and just remove text chat, and replace it with a clever gamut of canned messages and emotes (as in player animations).

You can even make basically, chainable, combined sets of messages of phrases, like a 'do you have a' and then a list of vetted objects... or 'go to the' and then places, etc.

Yep, thats not perfect, people will get clever and lewd with it, but its way, way more controlled, and still allows a good deal of free expression.

(Fuck, at this point I think you could make a decent case for just making that kind of thing a lot more widespread, given the just dogshit insanity that is most games chat lobbies...)

You do that, and at least in your own game, you probably dont have a way of luring a kid to some specific off site, out of game thing.

This is just like with anti-cheat measures:

100% safety and security is impossible.

But that doesn't mean there are not reasonable and maybe clever ways to come up with a paradigm for balancing safety and functionality.