Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit trust, for example schools.
Not the original parent, but because you are tasking a literal child to have the ability to be able to understand extreme social nuance with an already limited understanding of social situations. Children should be made aware of some of these dangers, but overall, most children won't have the psychological or social tools to be able to properly handle these issues, especially when the in-universe rewards are so massive (fame and popularity in Robolox is something children really crave, a sense of belonging is pretty core to human psychology). From my perspective, it's all around healthier to disengage in the platforms that enable such toxic behaviors to take place, especially when the platform creators are fiscally incentivized to turn a blind eye.
The way parents talk about about children these days is weird. I hung out in tons of sketchy and seedy places as kid growing up in the mid-90s with the internet at home and I did not turn into a train wreck.
...or maybe that's the reason I'm hanging out on HN with the rest of you as an adult.
That’s a nice story of personal bias. You survived, so todays kids should too, right?
Well, times have changed and the creeps have gotten creepier and more organized. They have more channels, more ways to hide, more ways to collaborate, and more ways to do serious damage.
As for the 80s and 90s? I also survived doing some stupid and shady things on BBSes and the internet. I don’t want children to have learn the lessons I learned the same way. I also know people who didn’t come out okay. Who didn’t have a parent or friend check in on them, and got in deep in bad stuff and ended up in prison or dead. Don’t try to cook up drugs in your kitchen using a random recipe on the internet, kids.
I did too, but mid 90s internet was Disneyland in comparison. Phone phreaks and anarchists and warez rings aren't like the professional groomers recruiting for terrorists and pedophiles and slavers.
Children aren't stupid. Or at least they can be made less stupid by teaching them. They are surprisingly perceptive, and by the time they can chat online, they have little trouble with social nuance in my experience.
It's not a question of intellect; adolescents are emotionally undeveloped. It's extremely straightforward for a manipulative adult to find an emotion they are struggling with and offer them comfort.
This is obviously easier to do with kids that aren't getting the support they need at home, but it's still not that hard to do with those that are thriving.
Totally agree, kids aren't stupid. They also aren't generally able to sense and avoid insidious intent from adults adept at playing socially reprehensible games. I try not to treat my kids like idiots but that doesn't mean letting wolves in the door either. Not that that can be perfectly prevented.
Blame is for people who've hurt others. My child suffering some painful consequences of their mistake doesn't hurt me (I feel upset about it, but that's on me).
> Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
Because predators are older and smarter than your average naïve kid. A few years ago I'm making breakfast for my wife (I work from home) and the doorbell rings - it's two town cops asking if I'm the parent of <my kid's name>. Turns out, some local pedophile had sent some dick pics to my 12 year old kid several months prior on Snapchat and they wanted to interview her. This was the first we'd heard of what had happened. We'd long since removed her from social media (unrelated to this event). And this was after spending countless hours repeating ourselves to death about not talking to strangers online. And yes we checked her phone daily...But Snapchat being what it is (disappearing messages), makes it more difficult to audit. She even told this guy what neighborhood we lived in. Since this was his first offense, the guy got 6 months probation and a permanent restraining order against him. Nothing ever came of it, and she's a few years older (and hopefully wiser) ... and the social media restrictions are still on.
In hindsight I wouldn't give my kid a phone until they were > 15 years old and even then it would depend on their maturity level.
It’s either allowing dangers of internet or allowing some peer pressure because your kid is “loser who not only is not on snapgram but doesn’t even have a phone and they’re in a second grade already”
Nope. We’ve checked her phone daily since she got her phone. You’d be amazed at how kids will complain for a few days and then just get used to the restrictions when they see that it’s their loss if they don’t comply. Another example, she wanted to keep her phone in her room at night. Nope, not gonna happen. “But my friends…” “Your friends are not my children, if you want a phone you turn it in at 10pm”. She complained for a few days…and now it’s just the routine.
The technique used by grooming gangs in the UK is as follows: get the child to do something the parents wouldn't approve of (smoke a cigarette, drink, do drugs, etc) and document it, use that documentation to blackmail the child into doing more. It becomes a spiral that the kid doesn't know how to escape from.
The way I hope to prevent that is to ensure that my daughter knows that, while I may disapprove of things like drinking, I'll always forgive her. I also make her clear on the line adults should not cross.
Besides that, I try to build her self esteem and street smarts as much as I can. In addition I have her question authority, myself included.
I love my kids, but at the roblox age, kids are assholes. Self Centered. Egotistical assholes. Their brains don't know any better and while you can teach them everything you could hope they learn, they have this chemical in their body that basically says "my parents are idiots and I know better" and they're going to make mistakes and do stupid things. The amount of unfettered mistakes and stupidity one can do on the internet is boundless. I didn't grow up with such boundless access to the world.
These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we used to know it. Kids used to draw something that their parents would hang on the fridge and they didn't make 350 bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to create and they had to work.. and they stopped being kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these communities to profit off child labor.
But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat - then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter, instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
THat desire for instant gratification and community at all costs then has them looking for other people in similar situations and that usually means self diagnosing things, searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep up. Not even them.
So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't equipped to handle it either.
Modern "free-to-play" games are so dangerously designed working not on just the core dopamine reward ratio (already known by Las Vegas for slot machine payouts), but incorporating false peer group pressure, "planned bullying" to get players to pay out rather than play for free, sunk cost fallacy, and probably a half dozen others.
As a counterpoint, my kid was playing a game on Roblox that taught them basics of avoiding fraud before allowing them to play. It was a game about trading animals. It is not all bad.
I have an eight year old and no matter how many times I explain the concept of sarcasm he just can’t get it. Even seconds after explaining the concept, I test him with an absurd statement and he takes it literally. I have made repeated attempts to teach him and he just doesn’t get it. Their brains are still developing
Really? I've been doing the Futurama "Good news, everyone!" thing with the kids for quite a while now and they twigged on pretty much immediately.
Obviously more subtle sarcasm is harder to pick up on, but even adults struggle with this, eg. Americans having a hard time with British "bone-dry wit".
You should definitely educate, but pick your battles. If Roblox is that infested with predators, and they are gonna be sophisticated, then maybe it is easier to avoid.
Even as an adult how many of us get scammed. Even cops do!
> why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
You can certainly do that, but it wouldn’t be good enough. It’s like spear phishing, it doesn’t matter that 90% of people recognize the attempt and report it, the 10% that doesn’t is absolutely unacceptable (at least when you transplant it to Roblox).
Would you accept a 10% chance your kid is going to be groomed?
Schools also have oversight, accountability, hiring background checks, and almost everyone interacting with the children will have gone through years of education and training.
Roblox (and basically all social networks/games for that matter) are pretty much the wild west when it comes to moderation and protection of minors.
Adults get scammed. Adults "should know". We cannot expect kids to be better at spotting social engineering than fully grown adults. At least adults have other tools at their disposal to deal with the consequences psychological, legal, etc.
These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit trust, for example schools.