Null TerraRoblox is a problem — but it’s a symptom of something worse
alyaza [they/she]www.platformer.news/roblox-ceo-interview-backla…
On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we've done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company's history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as "bizarre," "unhinged," and a "car crash."
And a case can be made that it was all of those things — even if Baszucki, in the studio afterwards and later on X, insisted to us that he had had a good time. In the moment, though, Baszucki's dismissive attitude toward discussing child safety struck me as something worse: familiar.
Baszucki, after all, is not the first CEO to have insisted to me that a platform's problems are smaller than I am making them out to be. Nor is he the first to blame the platform's enormous scale, or to try to change the subject. (He is the first tech CEO to suggest to me that maybe there should be prediction markets in video games for children, but that's another story.)
What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
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henfredemarsThe “something worse” is CEOs giving zero fucks about the harm they cause to society at large.
Imagine the levels of depravity and lunacy you have to sink to to just accept this happening on your platform, to see the harm you are causing society but choosing to ignore it because profits come first.
That’s why CEOs are a disgusting stain on this world, among others. They have ejected empathy and decency and become profit-driven, capitalism goblins.
You mean the 40 people out of 131,000,000 who had parents that let them be unsupervised on Roblox?
Really, that sounds like Roblox has very little problems.
yea, fuck those kids, they surely had it coming /s
Not what I'm saying. Just saying that there's 131 million players and blaming Roblox for like 40 incidents is dumb. That's like 0.0000012%. 700 kids a year die from being hit by cars. 900 kids a year die from drowning. 500 kids every year are murdered by their own parents.
Saying Roblox is to blame when it's such a comparatively small amount of everything else in the world is stupid. You can't sterilize the planet from danger. Roblox isn't even a blip when compared to most other things.
CoelacanthSince 2018, at least two dozen people in the United States have been arrested and accused of abducting or abusing victims they met on Roblox
These are only the ones who got caught, by the way. And only in the US. What an absolute shitshow.
PxtlThe very idea of a user-generated content free-to-play MMO for children with whack-a-mole moderation is totally bananas. Even good whack-a-mole moderation would be a bananas design.
I'm okay with little kids online gaming, but it needs to be in content that has been approved by a responsible adult in a setting where either adults are actively supervising or the children are on a server where we know everybody who's in there.
like fucking neopets has existed for SCORES longer than roblox and i’ve yet to see a massive neopets-pedophile scandal. much less one that the company seems to publically ignore as much as is legally possible.
clearly it’s something you CAN prevent!
chickenI haven't played neopets, is there something about its design that would make the situation better than roblox?
Less interaction, probably. It's been >20 years since I even went to the site, so my take is probably old and useless, just like me. The only interactions between people were the 'fights' where you might have seen their name for less than two minutes. There was a forum where you might have talked with people, and a 'newspaper' where people could submit stories. I think that's actually where I found my fondness for fanfiction. There are always a few gems hidden in the galaxy of rotted milk that exists in the written word.
Weren't there also player run shops, complete with fully HTML customizable store front pages?
Also weren't fully customizable html home pages, not unlike MySpace pages, a thing in Neopets? I could swear I had one, but maybe I'm remembering wrong?
Also there was a private message system if I recall correctly that could be used to send a message to any other Neopets user.
I remember the shops, but not any interactions through them. I don't remember much other than setting a price on items, so maybe there were opportunities there. And yes, private messages were a thing.
When you had a shop you could set up a store front page using HTML and in doing so could use your shop to broadcast messages to other players that visited your shop .
Yeah, capitalism.
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Is it really accurate to call Roblox a video game? Seems more like a pedophile hangout den to me. What’s more reasonable? The country that banned the pedophile hangout den or the one that encourages it to flourish? Seems obvious to me which country is the real shithole. Taking the side of pedophiles seems like an odd stance on your part, but go off king.
Why wouldn't video games exist under anything but capitalism? Communists still had movies? And also the USSR produced one of the most famous, well recieved and respected games that is still around today.
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I notice you have no actual refute, interesting
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Roblox is permanently banned from this household and I suspect this will become a lot more common.
We need to end the infinite smorgasboard model. That goes for all streaming services and Youtube as well. It's breaking this entire generation of children and history will 100% look back on it as just as bad as drugs and alcohol, if not worse.
This could potentially be done with an identity system that allows a company to verify the age a user while not knowing anything else. Although I trust pretty much nobody to do it while respecting privacy and security.
Roblox is one of the most evil companies in the world, actively exploiting children for profit and for cheap labor. A joke for safety guardrails (you can’t even restrict your child from adding anyone as a friend or restrict them from receiving friend requests from total strangers, all you can do is block them after the fact). They allow children to create accounts with no email or verification so that they can get around parental controls and engage with predators if they are motivated and resourceful
Evidence of predators abusing children on their app and their response is to silence the people shining the light on it.
There may be good things that come from Roblox but it’s ran by some of the most despicable people and is a net negative in the world in my opinion
And we would not want to shut down the entire internet to prevent a single bad thing from ever happening.
And this is the point where I think the author can go fuck themselves. Children are not statistics they're people and if we're not willing to go to the absolute limit to protect them we do not deserve an internet.
Protection of children on the internet should never be one-sided. It shouldn't be the services protecting children only.
And while I agree that the issue with Roblox is systemic (as in, the whole company doesn't give a flying fuck about kids being groomed as long as the groomer paedos are buying Robux in large enough quantities), and they should be doing more, what really needs to change is parents' attitude.
Because let's be honest, most parents are just like Roblox, they don't give a flying fuck about what their kids do on the internet as long as they get their 15-20 minutes of uninterrupted me-time.
And it's not even directly the parents' fault, I'd argue, because most parents today simply don't have the knowledge and capacity to secure their kids' online activities. The tooling on most platforms (looking at both Apple and Google, although Microsoft and Sony are similarly bad) is tucked away, not intuitive, barebones just so they can claim "we have parental control". Most routers, phones, laptops, consoles, etc. all do the same. You need to be on sysadmin level to properly set up security rules for kids, something that should come out of the box. If we've managed kid-safe containers for medication, washing up liquid, dishwasher soap, bleach, etc., surely we can manage a properly unified approach to protecting kids?
Oh but of course that's not a priority for our hyper-capitalistic systems.
Overall, no, I strongly disagree with your opinion on making the internet a shittier place just to protect kids. It's like recommending a sex shop to have a child friendly lobby in case a parent let's their crotch goblin wander in... idiotic and the polar opposite of what we should be doing.
In addition to the rampant pedophilia problems, did anybody else catch Baszucki talking about Polymarket integration? Yeah, let's add gambling to the mix. /s
I have no idea why any parent would let their kid anywhere near this dumpster fire.
Yes. It's a symptom of paedophile culture, which is based on patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism, beauty standards, and rape culture etc.
Edit: And that children are largely seen as property, or not people by a lot of 'adults', especially in the US as they never ratified the UN's convention on the rights of the child.
This isn't the only way to help, but a big one would be giving children freedom, rights etc as laid out by the Youth Liberation movement. The more children are controlled and have no say, aren't taught how to have boundaries and to consent or not, and don't have those boundaries and (lack of) consent respected, and aren't taught what sex is etc the more they will fall victims to these predators.
Of course there is more that needs to be done, but it is a good start.
Children are people, it's time we started treating them like it.
While I agree with everything, I think this is more about fearing parents remove their children from the platform by knowing about the issue.
What probably needs to happen is them receiving an actually global scandal.
I think caregivers and children should definitely sit down and talk about it. Roblox is, for many reasons a predatory company. Just like most capitalists they don't actually care about people, especially children. This has been shown not only in their lacklustre response to paedophiles, but also in their use of child labour to make them richer. Which they then do not compensate the children for fairly.
Agreed, that might help, I really really want Roblox gone, or controlled by those that actual utilise it for it's allegedly intended purpose. The youth do need places online where they can be safe until what I talked above is implemented, sadly it seems nothing commercial is actually the way to do it, given the repeated reports of poor mental health, predatory behaviour etc coming from so called 'child spaces' on commercial platforms.
the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:
I see Baszucki borrowed a few pages from the Trump handbook on how to bullshit until you've derailed the question so much, nobody even remembers what was asked.
It's definitely been a thing before Trump. A lot of corporate and publicity speak is like this. Trump is certainly the most prominent, visible, and 'obvious through exposure' figure and example of this right now though.
Roblox wants the future of communication to be via Roblox?
No they want to capitalize on pedos finding victims.
I wish we could find out what part of these ceo's brains are physically broken and fix it by force. There's the whole Grey area of like is this ethical but if we could determine this defect without any error I think it would be a breakthrough similar to curing cancer.
Biological and psychological variance is an Internet part of humanity. When you say this I'm immediately reminded of fascist ideals and efforts to 'normalize' and 'conformize' people, and not just from this side of the spectrum. So I think this is a somewhat dangerous argument to make.
At large, it's human nature to elevate these kinds of people, that's why they end up in such high positions. I'm not sure we can change that. And that's where regulations and requirements by law come in, as well as public record and press, to keep them in check.
I get the sentiment and frustration in your comment though.
I wholeheartedly agree. It does sound dangerously similar. Ultimately, the main difference would be that I don't want to hurt people(also to be frank it's straight up impossible and imaginary to change people like this. lol). I just want them to be compassionate. I think ultimately, they need empathy. Maybe if i phrased it that way, it would sound less messed up. But yeah, they need to have empathy and a guilty conscience. If we could make everyone have that, it would be a much better place to live.
Governments don't seem to want to do enough about them. They're willing to let millions of people die because of billionaires. It just seems absurdly cruel and we just have to kind of sit and watch or get trampled on too.