Hey Roblox Engineers on here - a brilliant article, by the way - and I want to chip in here, I'm a senior engineer and understand how tech works all the way down. NAND gates, flip-flops and I/O schedulers, and networks? No problem.
I have two young children, a boy and a girl. They both love playing Roblox, and I play along with them too, and their friends join in as well. Yes, they both always want more Robux, but let's look at this from a different perspective:
They create their own worlds - often amazing, it's not like they can run out of LEGO pieces, their creativity is their only barrier. In COVID lockdown, they could carry on playing with their friends, despite not being physically together. Humans still monitor and care for the "game", yes, some bad actors might get through occasionally, but on the whole, it's a safe and well-controlled, fun place to be. I used the concept of a Roblox Avatar to gently explain to my children, that people online might not be all they pretend to be - after all, in some games, I'm a super weight-lifter with a six-pack, and I have wings too :-O We all laughed. It's already taught both my children some genuine life-lessons - working in a pizza shop and doing deliveries, earning money, deciding how to lay out their dream houses (and Theme Parks!), and so on - plus, the importance of locking the door to keep the "bad guys" out.
All this, whilst having fun. Roblox is a force for good - if you pay the odd time for some credits, then so what, developers and us creatives also have to keep the roof over our heads.
I don’t think anyone has anything against Roblox as a sandbox game, but your glossing over of the predatory monetization is the real issue most people have with the game.
For tech literate parents, setting a spending limit is easy enough and we understand how these games are engineered to be addicting. But for the normies, they don’t know how it works and how to set appropriate limits. Personally, I think kids games with such heavy monetization should be outlawed. The pseudo-gambling aspects of these games is also highly problematic and we see this playing out now as sports gambling and crypto speculation are off the charts in our society with young adults.
It is amazing how gambling has so thoroughly infiltrated the US. When my older brother was young the cartoons could not have (or consist of) toy commercials, and often included at least a token moral lesson. Now my kids see games and YouTube channels that are filled with thinly veiled gambling tricks. MrBeast has shamelessly built an empire on it. (His charity washing not withstanding.)
Hello, sir!
Since you are so nice, would you please reimburse my daughter for the 300€ she spent without authorization? I mean, the Robux were bought at 11 PM, all in a burst, as a typical addiction pattern. She didn't even get to use them, since I got a notification about the money being used via the phone company (of course, she never had to steal a credit card, she found one of the infinite ways of siphoning money for bullshit virtual money; but no, it's the parents' fault for not realizing there is yet another backdoor allowing kids to spend money they don't have; and don't worry, the phone company hides them well enough that even if you try to enable all sorts of parent controls, there's always an extra option allowing them to be overridden, and in the most discreet way possible).
(By the way, I already tried to ask for reimbursement, but then Roblox says it's Google Play's fault; Google says it's the phone company's fault; and the phone company says it's the parents' fault for not disabling the hidden "allow spending 20 times the monthly bill on bullshit" checkbox that's locked with the "allow EU roaming"; so if your kid ever needs to cross the border, and can still call you for free thanks to EU rules, you'll still need to let them enable "spend 300€ out of bundle" because the law forgot about this loophole, so of course the phone company used it.)
Oh, wait, maybe this is part of the genuine life lessons Roblox is supposed to teach children?
> NAND gates, flip-flops and I/O schedulers, and networks? No problem.
That's kind of a weird flex.
> This infrastructure must support thundering herd situations where more than 21 million users join a single experience simultaneously
> we now predict capacity needs up to two years in advance
Those two statements taken together are mind boggling
I really love the core idea of Roblox, if only it weren't a scam targeting kid's birthday money.
If kids pay 5-10 bucks every once in a while to support their entertainment and pay engineering salaries… is that the worst thing in the world? I’d rather my kids play Roblox than scroll Instagram. One of those is “free”.
I recently attended a class with my kid on internet safety taught by an attorney specializing in defending children accused of crimes, especially those involving computers.
Roblox is like the #1 cesspool for bad shit going down with kids on the internet. Social media is bad as well, and my kids do neither. No, Roblox is not the end of the world, but there’s no real compelling reason to open up to it.
They play with their friends on XBox Live, with voice chat limited to friends we personally add.
The #1 by raw numbers, or normalized for userbase?
Raw numbers, of course. There are places on the internet dedicated to crime, so if you normalize by userbase all the 100% criminal sites come out on top.
Only some of Roblox is trying to get children addicted to gambling.
As someone with no experience of roblox but has heard this a few times, what exactly about it makes it 'such' a bad thing??
Roblox has a seemingly impossible to solve problem with child predators. Kids have the oddest talent of being able to stumble into the most unknown, niche games where these people lurk. Roblox now has voice chat as well and you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention.
Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays.
As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
> you have grown adults talking to teenagers in private, unsupervised and away from parental attention
Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
It’s important to be involved. It’s also important to give kids safe freedom with guardrails. It’s a balancing act.
If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
IIuc, the original point/implication of this thread of conversation was more like "there's an unusally high concentration of child predation on Roblox", which, while not invalidating it, is a considerably different problem than "there is more child predation than there ought to be on Roblox".
The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.
I was just responding to this point:
> The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s
I think there is a big difference to some of the examples they gave, because of the uniquely young age demographics on Roblox. The only example that seems comparable was Club Penguin.
Now, I agree that there is interest in teasing out whether there are problems with Roblox specifically, or if it is just a problem with having an online space with such a high concentration of kids in general. But that high concentration of kids does make it much more of a concern either way.
Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
In those games its more difficult to create a private hangout space or "GTA for kids". Haven't heard of the weird romance thing, but seen my nephew playing a roblox game where the goal is kill as many people wheelchairs as you can. I saw I guess the humor in it because I played San Andreas when I was his age but him mom might have been shocked. Those other games are much more restricted in the possibilities, moderation seems impossible
Roblox has a very young playerbase, even when compared to Minecraft and Fortnite. Roblox is also unique in the sheer quantity of offences that happen on their platform, and that is why they are often singled out.
But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety.
The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)
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> child romance themed game
Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S
I think it’s easy for people to contact each other in game and this to get kids to move over to a discord away from moderation. That’s the basic MO the instructor said how “grooming” in Roblox works.
The YouTube channel “People Make Games” had a really great video on the exploitation going on
IIRC that video is about how young content creators get exploited, which is indeed a bad thing but not exactly what GP is asking about (young players getting predated upon)
13 years old and above can talk and dm with any other account also 13 years old and above. Unless a parent account disables it.
I once overheard our nine year old explaining to a friend how to lie about their birthdate to create a YouTube account. Age checks are not meaningfully a working thing.
Parent account can be used for any age and can disable chat.
Because the company knows that there are child predators on their site, and not only do they not care, but that is basically their tacit business model.
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
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This is because roblox is the #1 place for kids to interact and play and such. The creeps and weirdos and predators are going to follow wherever they go.
AIUI, they let stranger adults give kids in game currency.
What do you think that leads to?
The same was true in World of Warcraft. What did that lead to?
I'm sure it's the #1 platform involved in "defending children accused of crimes involving online platforms" in whatever US state that attorney operates in. But even that sounds better than the lifelong dopamine system disabilities that the likes of TikTok causes. Every other adult I talk to about social media admits having had to very deliberately uninstall/disable TikTok, else they just couldn't detach themselves from the screen. Now imagine what it does to kids. And how big of a % of users ends up like this compared to the % of all Roblox users traumatized by it.
Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.
They can both be horrible! My kids do none of any of that. Works well for us!
> If kids pay 5-10 bucks every once in a while to support their entertainment and pay engineering salaries
If this was a game that had a subscription fee or where you had to buy the new version every year, that might be true.
These games don’t work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual player. They’re designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you’re enticed to pay 5-10 bucks there, then you’re scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next thing.
The amount a child can spend on Roblox is entirely up to the parents.
Children, especially pre-teens, don’t have access to credit or money without their parents consent, and a pretty easy way to limit the amount of money your child can spent on Roblox is to just make them have to ask you to buy the in-game currency.
There are problems with the game but the amount of money going into it is something a parent can and should 100% control.
Clearly you aren't aware how many kids steal their parents' credit cards to buy Robux. It's a very common thing.
How common is it, and how specific to Roblox purchases? What about 19$ Fortnite cards, or whatever currency those "Tiktok NPCs" that make noises at children are paid in?
If toy stores had a subscription fee or where you had to buy a new access pass every year, that would be fine.
They don't work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual child. They're designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you're enticed to pay 5-10 bucks for another toy, then you're scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next toy.
Roblox engages the exact same psychological manipulation that gambling does.
Would you let your children go nuts at a casino? Or online with sports betting or crypto slots?
The problem isn't the $5-10. It's the psychological manipulation.
As a parent, if you sit down with your kid and curate (or at least actively check/approve) what they are playing on Roblox, it’s fine. Mine just uses it to socialize with her real life friends, who are also all there. She sticks to the wholesome stuff, it might as well be Minecraft.
Sure, but at that point, why not just Minecraft then?
She does! A lot of her friends left Minecraft though, but we still play together.
The problem is, most parents don’t.
I actually don't know very much about Roblox. I was under the impression that it was more like a storefront sort of thing, with 3rd party games being hosted there? Kind of like one of those 'old' flash game portals, except you buy the games and ingame items.
Where do the gambling tricks come in?
It sounds more like the same psychological manipulation that underpins the IRL world (at least the US) in the form of capitalism. Engineered towards adults to buy as much useless crap as possible.
Teach kids that it’s the same kind of manipulation as in their games (and how to spot it) and perhaps they will be better equipped to not get fucked by adult life.
There are better alternatives to both of those that we should guide our children towards rather than just throwing up our hands and giving them their screens
Roblox is awful with lots of weird crap and opportunity for abuse.
Fortnite is way better and safer.
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imo it’s so bad that employees might as well be working at Meta. It’s an ethical decision. Maybe their ethical framework supports it, but mine doesn’t.
My mom paid my $5/mo Runescape subscription when I was a child and those are some of the fondest memories I have.
Looks like a fun game, but sadly I had to pay Minecraft for my kid instead because of the really hostile position of Roblox on letting their client run in Linux.
Title: The Infrastructure Supporting Record-Breaking Experiences
One reason to not work at Roblox is all their user peaks are when you want to be with your family- after school, after dinner, the weekend, Christmas morning. Seems like it could be frustrating after a while.
AIUI, they try to offset this with lots of money
And their CEO is a tech oligarch wannabe iirc.
If they didn't use Kubernetes, they'd probably only need 10% of the capacity! /s but also not exactly /s
Roblox is famously on the "hashistack" and uses Nomad instead of Kubernetes. What is the purpose of your comment?
kids should _not_ be playing roblox unsupervised (or at all?). it’s full of inappropriate and seemingly unmoderated content, while simultaneously being built to extract microtransactions.
amazing infra challenges, just a shame is a cesspool.
My two daughters play Roblox.[1] Their parental control has improved a lot. However, I find that it is more about training and helping your kid understand how to be careful online than interacting with a 'better' Online Entity. Today, it is Roblox; there will be a lot of others. I know it will never be a solved problem, but help them understand very early on what to do and what not to do.
We usually do routines - while in the car, at home - "What are our online protocols?", "What if someone, even if they seem like a tiny kid, asks you for anything personal?" "If someone told you that it is one of our family or relatives, what are the challenge words and codes?" etc.
> being built to extract microtransactions.
Right. Company's finance is based off on 1) letting game devs sell loot boxes freely to children. It's a legal slot machine for kids 2) paying developers with their own currency which then can be converted to tangible currency
These should be illegal
While true this statement generalizes to any internet connected service. 2000s internet had loads of wild content, anyone remember LiveLeaks?
And Roblox has decent parental controls. You can disable any chat outside a curated group of friends, and not sign up for micro transactions.
> You can disable any chat outside a curated group of friends
IMO public chat should be disabled by default for U13 accounts, not the other way.
Idk, I play with them, and it seems the usual online game activities, not anything crazy.
The games are pretty additive though, and the fake money becomes real money pretty fast.
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Terrible comparison not worth attacking.
Eat a bag of dicks, Roblox and the engineers that enable child labor.
Try to express your opinion in a nuanced way that explains your position, there's plenty of yelling online already and it doesn't help.
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