This is also covered here by “People make games”

https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

The article seems to mostly parrot the two videos. They're worth watching, but remember to have a hard think about whether the authors may be over-reacting at points.

My opinion about what I remember: Completely agree regarding the gambling accusations and terrible exchange rates (definitely a platform issue). The "game studio"/abuse claims seem a little cherry picked and fear-mongering, however (I used to be in a Minecraft community in which some strange things happened. Does it have anything to do with Mojang?).

Thanks, I came here to post this.

It does seem like the Roblox ecosystem is currently designed to encourage and capitalize on bad decisions by minors.

It's too bad, I like the idea of an open world that people can develop and extend.

You mean Roblox and the games the kids make on Roblox to make more pretend money in Roblox to use in the roulette market hoping to win it big?

Yes, there’s a lot there to be worried about.

Sending kids out to deliver papers or work in burger restaurants is also a good experience for them, even if it’s unpaid.

The reason child labor is illegal is not because we’re under the wrong assumption that work experience itself is bad for them.

The main reason it’s illegal is that it creates perverse incentives against schooling.

Which is funny because schooling is also unpaid labor for a child. In fact, they may be bamboozled into tens of thousands of dollars of student debt.

Plus one. Kids should absolutely be allowed to do certain work. They banned it with literal “save the children” dogma and pictures of children in copper mines and working the looms. Let the fucking kids toss a news paper. That’s such bullshit to outlaw the fucking concept of people working before the age of 16 or whatever.

Sounds like you’ve not read anything into the details at all. At face value, yes there could be nothing wrong with a game allowing kids to be creative and share what they build.

But if LEGO started coming with lottery tickets in the kids sets, had adds for exploitative devs that ran real businesses with 7year olds on payroll in “pretend money” that can be exchanged on black sites that LEGO approved of by not taking any actions, well you start to get in to problems.

The thing is that Roblox is not just a unsuspecting pawn here. They are deliberately fostering this, they know about the toxic development environment, so they closed their own forums to avoid legal implications, they knowing promote gambling to kids, they allow sites that exchange in game currency for money because it helps grow their game.

> It also lets kids learn a lot of entrepreneurial skills if they have that bent, which I view as a massive plus.

I’m sure the experience of working as an underage kid for a grown man sexually targeting underage girls will very valuable in the startup world, especially the part where the company gets informed and doesn’t do anything more than the bare minimum because his child labor ring is making them money.

It’s a game for kids, but it’s not made or owned by kids. We can hold them to a higher bar of responsibility.

Sounds like you've read anything that article says without thinking about it.

1. What kind of "lottery ticket" are you referring to? Lottery ticket, by definition requires random element. Does Roblox provide any such mechanics? No. A platform that you can buy and sell is hardly considered "lottery ticket" platform.

2. The forum is closed because of the toxicity of the posts, not because of the development environment. For development communication, they could use Guilded which is owned by Roblox, it's not like there is no legit alternative. If people choose to communicate out of the platform, how do you suppose Roblox to take any actions? They can't even verify if the provided evidence is true or not. Should Google ban a user's gmail account if that user did sexual harassment in their own company?

Amazing, we might finally be able to solve the great university diploma verification problem.

It’s really held back society that we haven’t been able to verify diplomas issued by centralized trusted institutions in a decentralized trustless fashion. /s

Sounds like a situation where there would be absolutely no doubt that the auction house would be liable for the error in a classical case. Also a case where the error would have been discovered or the transaction rolled back quickly perhaps with a small compensation to the buyer who would not receive the work.

So reading between the lines, the commercial aspirations won out over the core ideals of the creator who is now being pushed out completely, likely with some form of compensation package to not make a big fuzz, so they can now dive headfirst in a pool of money while abandoning any open source ideals?

So natural question, how long until they start squeezing more money out of users and how severe will it be for hobbyists and small companies?

> The misuse of Autopilot, which can control steering, speed and braking, has occurred on numerous occasions

It feels wrong to call it misuse when you’re literally using it the way Tesla has previously, is currently, and will continue to market it.

So someone in the know. Is this a false speculative article hyping Bitcoin, and if so when will we see the Coria ponding hike before the predictable fall after the intel makes a release denying it. And how many short positions are going to be liquidated and how high do we expect the thin spike to be?

I really hate the biased terminology and implied accusations that always follow these articles. Imagine McDonalds getting similar coverage back in the early 90’ies with them talking about their “dangerous growth at all cost strategy” and evil “psychological tricks of putting billboards on the roads that pass by the restaurants locations” Or the ever present toy commercials sprinkled in between childrens tv shows.

There’s no grand conspiracy or evil masterminds here, and teens aren’t being exploited. It’s just marketing targeting the target audience.

If we bought into the premise that adverts for teens where bad for them or that Facebook itself is harmful. We should not be discussing which ways they carried out their advertisement, we should be discussing how the government outlawed all forms of advertisement, print and media for teens and children and shut Facebook down along with all other social media.

Good point I'd love to have that discussion. Advertising to children should be illegal. Does anyone know of existing bills or proposals in this direction?