seriously, the article requires a lot of cw. Some of the quotes are very disturbing
They admit it’s for profit
Roblox is compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors, per our interview with a former senior product designer: “If you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics…in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
They admit it’s for profit
It's even stupider than that, they're not making profit so they're cutting corners on basic things like child safety to project an image of endless growth to prop up their stock price
the fact that a game is a publicly traded company is so hilarious to me
WHY ARE THERE WAYS TO HAVE GET NAKED AND HAVE SEX IN YOUR CHILDREN'S GAME?
Somebody knowingly sat down and wrote code to make it possible to hump things without pants on. Most M-rated games don't even have this feature. What the fuck.
Roblox lets users make their own skins and animations. They could stop it if they manually reviewed every thing being made but that's not possible in a way that would still make money.
Yea, this is important to point out, though it doesn't make any of this better by any amount at all. Roblox is essentially a game engine with a server browser and social media strapped on to it, it's not really a game in the normal sense. People can upload assets and write their own scripts to basically create whatever they want, it's not like Roblox themselves sat down and made any of this. The combination of a platform mainly played by children with social media built-in and the ability for people to upload whatever custom content they want with seemingly no moderation was bound to lead to horrors beyond my comprehension.
Edited: I'm surprised they didn't mention the hyper monetization that appeals to children heavily, like, this shit is worse than any mobile game you could think of. It's honestly fucking wild. You load into any game on the front page and you're hit with like 5 pop ups asking you to buy something and buttons all over your screen with countdowns for "exclusive deals" in their shop.
I'm actually not super surprised they don't focus on the monetization in the article. It really reads like it was written by business types who are primarily upset at Roblox lying about their numbers. I'm sure if Roblox were (somehow) able to properly kick out the pedos and still be ran profitably, they'd be perfectly happy with exploiting children for money.
Yea, I guess that makes sense. I didn't really read much, I skimmed through it read some bits and bobs and saw all the pictures and was like
that's enough for meIt really reads like it was written by business types
It is, Hindenburg Research is an investment firm, their main thing is going short on companies they feel are run poorly (esp fraud)
Overall, we think Roblox has adopted the Silicon Valley approach of ‘growth at all costs’, whether by misleading or outright lying to investors about its key metrics or by opening its platform to dangerous predators and illicit content unsuitable for children.
