The "child safety measures" was dividing the playerbase into age groups and banning almost all communication between them. The age groups are under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+. Users only speak to other players ±1 age group, so 18-20 can speak to 16-17 or 21+.
The problem is almost every game on Roblox is social and the matchmaking isn't mature enough to ensure players in a lobby can all communicate.
My favourite is "generic roleplay gaem". The main fun is inciting riots against the leader or forming alliances to do raids. I could join a game and within half-an-hour I'd be engaged in drama, since Roblox incentivizes ephemeral lobbies with random people meaning I don't need a lengthy time commitment to form an alliance.
But I can no longer do that because I am 25 years old and the lobbies are too young. Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic. But the matchmaking system literally makes that impossible.
I've had the same Roblox account for 18 years and have spent tens of thousands of Robux on the platform. I let Roblox scan my passport even, so they know who I am. Even though I own nearly 1000 Steam games, Roblox still filled my desire for low-commitment social games I could jump into on my phone or computer if I had a few hours of downtime. Now it is effectively unplayable.
I'm in favour of child safety. But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
> these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform
I see these as orthogonal issues.
Your mathmaking gripe sounds legitimate, and is probably driven by Roblox's low 21+ user numbers. That would be expected to change over time. At the same time, I'm not seeing a great argument for why these folks (EDIT: Roblox) should continue to have unfettered access to kids under 14.
If communication was proactively filtered to prevent bad actors (which Roblox obviously failed to do for years), why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
Roblox is effectively a casino for kids with more social elements than in adult casinos. The corporation failed to prevent children from rapists for decades. Why would any rational person trust them to implement either proactive communication filters or to even allow something so close to gambling amongst different age groups?
Roblox doesn’t deserve to be a business and I hope the lawsuits and equity markets solve that in a hurry.
> why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
My main problem is the kid is playing a game with significant social-media (and gambling) components. That's orthogonal to the question of who is playing with whom, which I agree, is theoretically solvable with better filters.
We have 18-year olds in high school in America. The headline risk from a 40-something sleeping with a high-school student is probably something Roblox wants to get ahead of.
This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?
They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.
Or perhaps you’ve aged out of a game that is primarily meant to be a place for children. The child safety measures make things more difficult for you because nobody wants you there. And it seems to be working as designed. Maybe it’s time to find a new game that’s more for your age group.
Roblox's introduction of mandatory face verification to chat is one of the most biggest examples of how people in tech can get so deep in trying to create a solid technical solution, that they completely miss the human problems it creates.
You could create the best possible face verification system that processes everything completely locally, uses CPU security features to make sure the photos stay exactly where they're supposed to, etc etc. You could design the best possible chat age segregation system that makes sure nobody can ever get groomed over chat again. You can get so deep that you forget you're forcing children to take pictures of themselves, and fail to consider the wider effects this will have on the safety of those kids in general.
How's Jimmy supposed to know that taking a picture of himself for roblox.com is okay, but taking a picture for somescamwebsite that he found in a Roblox game is absolutely not okay? This solution creates a much worse problem. Sane parenting would tell kids to never take pictures of themselves or put it on any website, but now we're clearly shifting the role of parenting to tech companies and we are going to see bad consequences of this.
Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on. Parents could rely on vendors to make devices where it’s easy to set appropriate locks, and rely on stores not to sell unlocked devices to kids.
But we don’t live in that world.
Also, the are trying to prevent adults from pretending to be kids, which is much harder than preventing kids from accessing adult sites.
This feels like a bit of a reach. It's not really clear that adding face scanning as a blocker for chat makes anyone more likely to fall for scams. These hypotethical god tier engineers should just make scam prevention software in addition to face scanning anyway?
If 11-year-old Jimmy is anything like I was a lifetime ago (in terms of understanding tech), he knows how to ask an LLM to take his picture and make him look like he's 18... and none of it matters anyways.
"While our aggressive push to enhance safety lowers our expectations for topline growth in 2026, it makes our platform fundamentally better and amplifies the long-term growth potential of Roblox through more effective content targeting, tailored communication experiences, and improved community sentiment," the company wrote in its letter to shareholders.
Man, I watched a couple segments of their people being interviewed (Creative Director, IIRC) and I have to agree with you, actual ghouls in sheep clothing.
The Internet Comment etiquette episode on Roblox Is both hilarious and so concerning.
Investors are hilarious. What’s better: more investment in child safety measures so that a company remains a long term product that parents allow their children on, or no safety measures to increase profit so that parents stop letting their kids be on the platform, thereby killing long term viability of the product?
Quarterly thinking is the bane of the health of corporate America.
In this case, "child safety measures" includes not just "stopping child predators," but also "not letting kids use their parents' credit card to buy $500 of Robux" and "not letting underage users buy lootboxes, aka gambling".
It's completely understandable that the company, which profits off children, putting in measures making it harder to profit off children, would lower both its long and short-term valuations.
Markets are future discounting machines. A stock price does not reflect the current economic reality, but rather the present-day anticipation of how that company will perform in the future. Adding more friction to user experience and onboarding seems like a legitmate concern for retention and growth. The collective thinks this won't be good for future earnings, and I'd be curious to hear why you think otherwise.
"According to the company, 73% of age-checked daily active users on Roblox were under 18, with 35% under 13 as of Jan. 31."
The story under the story seems to be Roblox has lost plausible deniability.
With increasing–and, in my view, inevitable–calls for age gating social media, these data mean between a third and three quarters of Roblox's users could soon be banned from monetisation or banned entirely from their platform.
> Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
Yes, this reduces the TAM of companies like Roblox in the near term. Countries should collectively regulate how much big tech can exploit minors. Minors cannot go to casinos, and the underlying gamification techniques for creating addiction are the same. Children are not some demographic to maximize for profits. If they aren't educated and raised correctly, a society collapses in less than 40 years.
If one is a psychopath and needs an analogy rather than "harming childrens' mental development for profit is morally and ethically evil": this is essential the same as setting catch quotas on fisheries, to maximize long term value at the expense of short term profit.
This is the second time in the last month that Hindenburgh's reports appear to be prophetic. Previously, they called out Backblaze before the company began harming its own product.
Hindenberg's 2024 report titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids": https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
> I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
Valve is a very interesting example to use here, I don't think of them as a game company anymore. They run Steam but I can't remember the last game they actually released?
Half life alyx and their push for openVR has made a big impact in that part of the gaming world.
But yeah, their games are just as filled with lootbox, crates, skin garbage as other low effort money grabs; saving grace being its all cosmetics only (and they’re private about their financials).
There was a time 5-10 years ago where Roblox was going on a ex-FAANG hiring spree and folks on Blind were pulling in insane salaries (probably still pay amazing).. but to work for fucking Roblox. Truly a "these are not my people" moment.
I wouldn't connect those things too closely, nor to the broader legislative efforts to ban pornography and monitor everyone's messages. Roblox has been a special hell of predatory interactions for a very long time now, and the walls may finally be coming down...
This is far more reaching than just Roblox, essentially all forms of online access where kids ("kids" most often being defined 15 and under) can hangout and communicate are rapidly being restricted. Facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat, whatsapp, discord, roblox, fortnite, steam, etc.
Obviously some companies have sketchier pasts and are feeling the pressure more, but this is a very broad trend of restricting online access and communication.
Most of the companies you've listed have been horrible at keeping kids safe - they simply don't care. I'm all for kids communicating and having fun, but we have to actually want to create safe ways to do both.
Yeah Nintendo is the same as Disney Toontown 20 years ago. It makes it basically impossible to form social bonds.
My bigger point is there are increasingly very few spaces for teenagers to socialize and interact (and at least in the US, very few offline), and what sort of long-term ramifications this is going to have. If the net outcome of this is kids return to playing outside and unfettered access to parks and neighborhoods as far as their bikes will take them, I think that's great, but I suspect those will also continue to be heavily locked down.
It’s abrupt only if you are unaware of safety challenges and issues in children’s gaming in the past decade.
Moderating user generated games is a kafkaesque joke. It’s not just text, audio, or video. It’s all of those combined in an interactive environment which can include trigger conditions - and one category of games is escaping from mazes.
Since it’s kids, you will end up with maps based on actual schools, combined with violence, on your mod que.
The list of horrifying stuff that happens frequently is quite long, and it’s unfortunate how unaware most people seem to be about it.
School maps, takes me back, I made them back in the day myself. Fact is kids spend so much time at school and it’s their social life as well. Of course in my day it was made by kids for kids, not by grooming adults.
The "child safety measures" was dividing the playerbase into age groups and banning almost all communication between them. The age groups are under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+. Users only speak to other players ±1 age group, so 18-20 can speak to 16-17 or 21+.
The problem is almost every game on Roblox is social and the matchmaking isn't mature enough to ensure players in a lobby can all communicate.
My favourite is "generic roleplay gaem". The main fun is inciting riots against the leader or forming alliances to do raids. I could join a game and within half-an-hour I'd be engaged in drama, since Roblox incentivizes ephemeral lobbies with random people meaning I don't need a lengthy time commitment to form an alliance.
But I can no longer do that because I am 25 years old and the lobbies are too young. Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic. But the matchmaking system literally makes that impossible.
I've had the same Roblox account for 18 years and have spent tens of thousands of Robux on the platform. I let Roblox scan my passport even, so they know who I am. Even though I own nearly 1000 Steam games, Roblox still filled my desire for low-commitment social games I could jump into on my phone or computer if I had a few hours of downtime. Now it is effectively unplayable.
I'm in favour of child safety. But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
> these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform
I see these as orthogonal issues.
Your mathmaking gripe sounds legitimate, and is probably driven by Roblox's low 21+ user numbers. That would be expected to change over time. At the same time, I'm not seeing a great argument for why these folks (EDIT: Roblox) should continue to have unfettered access to kids under 14.
If communication was proactively filtered to prevent bad actors (which Roblox obviously failed to do for years), why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
There’s a large risk and hugely adversarial nature/motivation for predators to bypass whatever proactive filtering is put in place.
Roblox is effectively a casino for kids with more social elements than in adult casinos. The corporation failed to prevent children from rapists for decades. Why would any rational person trust them to implement either proactive communication filters or to even allow something so close to gambling amongst different age groups?
Roblox doesn’t deserve to be a business and I hope the lawsuits and equity markets solve that in a hurry.
> why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
My main problem is the kid is playing a game with significant social-media (and gambling) components. That's orthogonal to the question of who is playing with whom, which I agree, is theoretically solvable with better filters.
Oh, I misunderstood. When you said "these folks" I assumed you meant older users, as opposed to Roblox corporation. Cool we're in agreement.
Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+? Aren't they all adult or in some countries children develop slower?
They aren't:
> Users only speak to other players ±1 age group
I.e., 18-20 can speak to 16-17 AND 21+, but 21+ can only speak to 18+
> Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+?
We have 18-year olds in high school in America. The headline risk from a 40-something sleeping with a high-school student is probably something Roblox wants to get ahead of.
Yes but an 18yo can also buy a gun, get drafted into the military, and produce OF/porn.
But no alcohol.
US drinking age probably being used as a proxy for "adult-ness".
This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?
They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.
What’s to stop a 40 year old from holding up a photo of their 15 year old self for the age verification camera?
You've had your Roblox account for 18 years? Wtf, I could've sworn that game was released 4 years ago!
Thanks for making me feel old I guess.
Or perhaps you’ve aged out of a game that is primarily meant to be a place for children. The child safety measures make things more difficult for you because nobody wants you there. And it seems to be working as designed. Maybe it’s time to find a new game that’s more for your age group.
Roblox's introduction of mandatory face verification to chat is one of the most biggest examples of how people in tech can get so deep in trying to create a solid technical solution, that they completely miss the human problems it creates.
You could create the best possible face verification system that processes everything completely locally, uses CPU security features to make sure the photos stay exactly where they're supposed to, etc etc. You could design the best possible chat age segregation system that makes sure nobody can ever get groomed over chat again. You can get so deep that you forget you're forcing children to take pictures of themselves, and fail to consider the wider effects this will have on the safety of those kids in general.
How's Jimmy supposed to know that taking a picture of himself for roblox.com is okay, but taking a picture for somescamwebsite that he found in a Roblox game is absolutely not okay? This solution creates a much worse problem. Sane parenting would tell kids to never take pictures of themselves or put it on any website, but now we're clearly shifting the role of parenting to tech companies and we are going to see bad consequences of this.
Ideally Roblox would be able to rely on the platform to tell them whether the device is child-locked or not. It would be up to parents to make sure their kids only have access to devices with appropriate locks turned on. Parents could rely on vendors to make devices where it’s easy to set appropriate locks, and rely on stores not to sell unlocked devices to kids.
But we don’t live in that world.
Also, the are trying to prevent adults from pretending to be kids, which is much harder than preventing kids from accessing adult sites.
This feels like a bit of a reach. It's not really clear that adding face scanning as a blocker for chat makes anyone more likely to fall for scams. These hypotethical god tier engineers should just make scam prevention software in addition to face scanning anyway?
If 11-year-old Jimmy is anything like I was a lifetime ago (in terms of understanding tech), he knows how to ask an LLM to take his picture and make him look like he's 18... and none of it matters anyways.
Man, I watched a couple segments of their people being interviewed (Creative Director, IIRC) and I have to agree with you, actual ghouls in sheep clothing.
The Internet Comment etiquette episode on Roblox Is both hilarious and so concerning.
https://youtu.be/ROG5V0tSuA0?si=iHjWlBy1dE1NtlsK
That interview of their CEO with the NYT from last year was insane. If you've never seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIXRgMlPo4
> interview of their CEO with the NYT
Do you have a source from the New York Times? (EDIT: Nvm.)
Second EDIT: the CEO reminds me of the energy vampire from What We Do in the Shadows.
It’s time for me to re-read MOMO by Michael Ende.
Maybe they edited their comment after you saw it, but they included a link to a video from the NYT YouTube channel.
That video is from the New York Times official account.
Oh whoops, didn't recognize the Hard Fork brand. My bad.
They have to head off the investor whos going to ask "is child safety bullish?"
Just about anything can be claimed to maximize shareholder profits in the long term. This is an illustrative example of how it's done.
Whether it actually turns out that way is another question.
Investors are hilarious. What’s better: more investment in child safety measures so that a company remains a long term product that parents allow their children on, or no safety measures to increase profit so that parents stop letting their kids be on the platform, thereby killing long term viability of the product?
Quarterly thinking is the bane of the health of corporate America.
In this case, "child safety measures" includes not just "stopping child predators," but also "not letting kids use their parents' credit card to buy $500 of Robux" and "not letting underage users buy lootboxes, aka gambling".
It's completely understandable that the company, which profits off children, putting in measures making it harder to profit off children, would lower both its long and short-term valuations.
So are you buying Roblox hand over fist? Didn't think so.
It's easy to talk big, it's hard to beat the supposedly stupid, myopic market.
Possible that there aren't measures that will actually achieve long-term safety while maintaining a highly popular platform?
Those profits, if they happen, will be delayed, so it means they aren't worth quite as much.
Markets are future discounting machines. A stock price does not reflect the current economic reality, but rather the present-day anticipation of how that company will perform in the future. Adding more friction to user experience and onboarding seems like a legitmate concern for retention and growth. The collective thinks this won't be good for future earnings, and I'd be curious to hear why you think otherwise.
It's not even quarterly thinking, it's castles in the sky speculation about what the market thinks the market will react to.
"According to the company, 73% of age-checked daily active users on Roblox were under 18, with 35% under 13 as of Jan. 31."
The story under the story seems to be Roblox has lost plausible deniability.
With increasing–and, in my view, inevitable–calls for age gating social media, these data mean between a third and three quarters of Roblox's users could soon be banned from monetisation or banned entirely from their platform.
Don't you have it backwards?
Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
> Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
Two thirds of Americans believe in "setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media" [1]. Where we have limited polling, a similar fraction support "banning social media use for all kids under 14" [2].
Joe Camel [3] was also intended for children.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-most-mass-voters-su...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Camel
Yes, this reduces the TAM of companies like Roblox in the near term. Countries should collectively regulate how much big tech can exploit minors. Minors cannot go to casinos, and the underlying gamification techniques for creating addiction are the same. Children are not some demographic to maximize for profits. If they aren't educated and raised correctly, a society collapses in less than 40 years.
If one is a psychopath and needs an analogy rather than "harming childrens' mental development for profit is morally and ethically evil": this is essential the same as setting catch quotas on fisheries, to maximize long term value at the expense of short term profit.
Roblox has long been known as a pedo farm, and talks with friends actually with kids all know it, so I don't know how it's still even around.
>"Before founding Roblox, he hosted a libertarian talk radio show for KSCO Radio Santa Cruz"
I am Jacks lack of surprise.
This is the second time in the last month that Hindenburgh's reports appear to be prophetic. Previously, they called out Backblaze before the company began harming its own product.
Hindenberg's 2024 report titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids": https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
More safety = less sales, got it, nothing to worry about here, parents.
The market valuates Roblox child abuse at almost a billion dollars?
Good.
I am curious why does Roblox even exist?
This shouldn’t even be a business, let alone a public company.
I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
> I wish games can just stay games like Valve does and not grow and grow and grow into public companies.
Valve is a very interesting example to use here, I don't think of them as a game company anymore. They run Steam but I can't remember the last game they actually released?
Technically it's not released yet but deadlock has 75k people playing as of writing this comment.
https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/charts/
Half life alyx and their push for openVR has made a big impact in that part of the gaming world.
But yeah, their games are just as filled with lootbox, crates, skin garbage as other low effort money grabs; saving grace being its all cosmetics only (and they’re private about their financials).
There was a time 5-10 years ago where Roblox was going on a ex-FAANG hiring spree and folks on Blind were pulling in insane salaries (probably still pay amazing).. but to work for fucking Roblox. Truly a "these are not my people" moment.
God forbid people want to work on video game stuff instead of for an advertising company.
Yeah, but for Roblox? That’s child gambling and child grooming.
Roblox is open buffet for pedos for YEARS.
These corporations don't give a sh...
Only thing you can do is to petition your lawmakers to ban whole platform.
Safety measures will always be a joke. Open chat/voice chat, "Hi, connect to my discord" -> all safety measures bypassed.
But at the end of the day, this a parenting problem.
Funny how the world abruptly decided kids shouldn't have social interactions online right as AI chatbots took off.
I wouldn't connect those things too closely, nor to the broader legislative efforts to ban pornography and monitor everyone's messages. Roblox has been a special hell of predatory interactions for a very long time now, and the walls may finally be coming down...
This is far more reaching than just Roblox, essentially all forms of online access where kids ("kids" most often being defined 15 and under) can hangout and communicate are rapidly being restricted. Facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat, whatsapp, discord, roblox, fortnite, steam, etc.
Obviously some companies have sketchier pasts and are feeling the pressure more, but this is a very broad trend of restricting online access and communication.
Most of the companies you've listed have been horrible at keeping kids safe - they simply don't care. I'm all for kids communicating and having fun, but we have to actually want to create safe ways to do both.
Have a look how Nintendo do it. Their communications between players was (is?) very limited.
Yeah Nintendo is the same as Disney Toontown 20 years ago. It makes it basically impossible to form social bonds.
My bigger point is there are increasingly very few spaces for teenagers to socialize and interact (and at least in the US, very few offline), and what sort of long-term ramifications this is going to have. If the net outcome of this is kids return to playing outside and unfettered access to parks and neighborhoods as far as their bikes will take them, I think that's great, but I suspect those will also continue to be heavily locked down.
It’s abrupt only if you are unaware of safety challenges and issues in children’s gaming in the past decade.
Moderating user generated games is a kafkaesque joke. It’s not just text, audio, or video. It’s all of those combined in an interactive environment which can include trigger conditions - and one category of games is escaping from mazes.
Since it’s kids, you will end up with maps based on actual schools, combined with violence, on your mod que.
The list of horrifying stuff that happens frequently is quite long, and it’s unfortunate how unaware most people seem to be about it.
At least so many people wouldn’t be surprised.
School maps, takes me back, I made them back in the day myself. Fact is kids spend so much time at school and it’s their social life as well. Of course in my day it was made by kids for kids, not by grooming adults.