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Concerns with Roblox are not new. For years there have been allegations and lawsuits around the exploitation of children developing effectively for free so the company can make bank. There's even been investigative journalism programs and articles about it.
Roblox exploits children.
Any space made for kids on the internet sooner or later will be bought up by some capital investment firm, and it will always end the same: enshittified
Now, if my email enshittifies, I'll get pissed, but I'll live.
If a kids space enshittifies, you get Roblox with the pedos which -arguably- is much worse than enshittified email.
We constantly seem to forget we need safe spaces for new people and soft entries for them to into fandoms, careers, and our world in general.
Im so tired of people acting like kids and people in general need to already be invested and fully formed adults in mind so that they can already be talked to and sold to like everyone else.
we need safe spaces for new people
That's woke
Ha yeah...
Sad now.
Just like irl spaces for kids and teens have died out, too.
No money? No exist.
Basically. And what's worse, because there's no child friendly spaces, children go onto the general web, and because of the panic about them seeing inappropriate material, we now have people who want to censor the internet using them as an excuse. For a lot of people, there is a reverse incentive to create child friendly spaces because that way they can use children to censor the internet with things like the Online Safety Act and KOSA.
The death of third spaces hurts everyone.
I was recently at a Hacker Festival in the Netherlands, and one of the things that I found neat was that there were plenty of kids there. There were activities on the timetable for kids, as well as spaces that were dedicatedly for kids. However, the event didn't feel like it was at all diluted for the sake of families — areas and activities intended more for adults still existed, as well as a general expectation for adults to be responsible and courteous when engaging in adult-only activities (such as drinking alcohol).
It felt like a cool model of coexistence that we don't get exposed to as much as we should in The Real World (TM). Whilst this openness towards the kids is partly for the parents, it's also cool for the kids who want to take part. For example, I remember that during a soldering workshop, I got talking to a boy sitting at my table — I think he was age 10-12ish. Whilst there was some level of me having to be mindful to be speaking with him in an appropriate way, this didn't prevent me from engaging with him as a peer; we had an earnest conversation about projects, and the usefulness of concrete goals; hobby burnout; and how much ambition is useful when you're learning a new skill. I wish I had more opportunities to hang out with kids in a capacity where I'm not actively in a mentoring role
In my Magic the Gathering community there's a few kids, youngest was 12 at some point. Most of us are adults 20-50.
I really like interacting with the kids, they bring a lot of innocent joy and glee to the game that many adults seems to forget, they're also quite competent and do win a lot.
We don't treat them much different from adults, apart from not talking about politics, interests rates and other boring adults stuff that suddenly became super interesting as soon as I got a job and mortgage.
Interesting, what is the name of the festival?
It was WHY2025. It stands for What Hackers Yearn, and this particular one happens every four years. However, there's also two other extremely similar ones (I am told — I haven't personally been to these others): the Electromagnetic Field Camp in the UK, held every two years; and the Chaos Communication Camp in Germany, also held every two years.
Put aside the internet for a moment.
Kids and teenagers used to have more real spaces to go hang out at. Community centers, shopping malls, arcades, etc.
Not so much these days. And it’s sad.
Parents don't want to drive kids everywhere, and cities have become more and more horrible for anyone outside of a car to travel around in.
Parents don’t want to drive kids everywhere, and cities have become more and more horrible for anyone outside of a car to travel around in.
That's by design, by making it impossible/dangerous to be outside of a car, you make it so people are forced to own a car to leave their house. Walkable streets and public transport aren't just a "children" issue, it's an economic issue against a world that wants to force you to give massive corporations money.
All true. I just personally try to bring up walkability/good urban design whenever I see the opportunity (which is super often, because as you imply, it's an extremely wide-ranging issue touching most facets of our lives), and I tend to limit my comments (at least at first...I'll into further depth, like you did, if someone else then prompts further discussion of the subject) to specifically the matter at hand. In this case, that was children's independence.
Which ironically then leads into the children's safety issue that @psivchaz@reddthat.com mentioned, because of how a lack of people walking around leads to a lack of "eyes on the street", which adds to the feeling that children alone are unsafe and targets for kidnapping or whatever.
And everything costs money
A lot more than it was back then too. It's probably not viable anymore for some people.
Support your local public library
This right here.
If shit's expensive as adults imagine as a child.
As a parent, I'd be perfectly willing to drive my kids places. But where? Even if I took them to the mall, they'd be labeled "loiterers" and arrested, and if I drove them to the library someone would decide they're too young to be in public alone and arrest me for neglect.
Yeah, almost every town when I was growing up had a youth center. They were awesome. I also remember a lot of library programs for kids. I don’t see those so much anymore. And yeah, like every weekend there was some kind of community event geared toward kids. Also roller rinks and laser tag. They were a bit dated by my time but were still affordable and going strong.
Implying that the “childrens” websites of the early 00’s weren’t fraught with sexual innuendo and swearing, and home to predators of all kinds. Neopets, Club Penguin, Habbo, RuneScape, IMVU. I don’t think this poster is remembering them the way that they were.
I will say that growing up with these sites, and exposure to some of these things, I have become a savvier citizen of the internet. I understand wanting to protect kids, but they have to get out there on the real Internet someday, and losing all your rare painted neopets to a scammer makes you real unlikely to give your details to someone claiming to be your bank.
I don't remember much innuendo on the sites I played as a child (club penguin, bin weevils) although I've got vague memories that the censoring was so severe you could learn swear words based off seemingly innocent words being blocked out of the chat. The bigger issue at that age was how exploitative some of those sites were with microtransactions and I can only imagine it's gotten worse with the current MMO's for kids.
There was one I briefly played as a child where one of the starting missions was growing something in a garden but if you were a free playing customer you had to plant in the public garden and wait 24 hours, so I'd come back the next day and find someone had stolen the stuff I'd grown and couldn't progress. It was a weird way to learn about wealth inequality and the privileges wealthier kids got at the age of seven.
There was another site advertised on one of the kids TV channels here when I was younger that encouraged kids to sign up and mark off the chores they'd completed and each chore you completed netted you a prize like a trip to Disneyland. What the ad didn't tell us at that young age was that your parents would have to pay for the prizes through the sites affiliate link. I think I was at least mature enough by that stage to understand we'd been had and it wasn't my parents fault but it's crazy that nearly twenty years later the internet's somehow gotten worse for exploiting kids for micro transactions.
I believe this is from a combination of factors, including the lack of revenue streams from young site visitors and the necessary protections and moderation being expensive to create and maintain. It sucks, but with the modern Internet it won't exist for long if there's no money to be made.
the lack of revenue streams from young site visitors
Isn't it just as easy to show ads to kids as adults? They have to be curated more to make sure porn ads aren't popping up, but otherwise it should be the same (if not easier because kids are less aware of ad blocking software).
they'd also have to be non-targeted ads due to child privacy regulation, and a lot of internet ads that don't pay for targetting are scams and porn
don't forget prime which is an energy drink whose ads target primary school kids
Have you not seen the internet? So many spaces aren’t even safe for adults. The scams are out of control.
Go on, tell me the last time you didnt have to say “DONT CLICK THAT LINK MOM” just to be sure they don’t click a very obvious scam. Or have a long conversation about VPNs prior to handling identity online. Or describe AI hacks to someone.
And here you talk like it’s so very easy to make it safe for children.
Club Penguin goated in child safety. I remember certain servers limiting online speech to pre-selected options off a menu.
I think kids should be exiled to kids only places. But the issue is, a few adults sneak in, and no adults guarding? R.I.P kids.
that's one reason (but the main reason is control) why we have all this draconian shit. Because parents aren't parenting.
Yeah, this is indeed one of the main issues. Its tough being one of the only parents in the school that actually pays attention to what their children do online but perseverance is part of the game.
I still play Neopets every day. It's been excellent for my mental health and it's the most wholesome community I've ever been a part of.
PBS Kids is a thing and has been for a long time
Weren't those all flash games and videos? Do they still exist or did they make new games?
(I suppose the videos could just be converted)
They have plenty of games and videos that work on modern browsers. I imagine some of the flash stuff was converted years ago
This is the main reason I don't use tiktok, ever since its inception: It was meant as a space for young people and I don't want to be one of the jerks who intrudes on that.
Yeah, there's privacy concerns and brainrot pearl-clutching and all of that, but while those are legitimate, my number one reason for not using it has always been that I believe there should be spaces for young people online that adults don't mess around or intrude in.
Roblox is not the same. I lose faith in humanity when I look at the front page of Roblox and see a bagillion people playing Brainrot Simulator.
Currently? I feel like it was years ago that Roblox's controversies came to the fore.
They used to have controversies. They still do, but they used to too.
I ain't buying this internet ID propaganda
Isn’t this just called online video games? Basically what Neopets was.