Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
jjmarr
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
ryandrake
Roblox is absolutely torching their platform, in many ways besides matchmaking and the age verification. Ask any kid who's grown up with the game. Players are leaving in droves and Roblox has become quite un-cool in the last six or so months.
xp84
As someone who dislikes predator havens that are combined with addictive dark patterns honed to maximize children begging parents for Robux (or just stealing parents’ credit cards to get it) I couldn’t be happier to see Roblox collapse.
I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
Aeolun
I can tell you right now that any kid that’s growing up with the platform right now couldn’t care less.
They don’t communicate in chat. They communicate by shouting at each other from 2 feet away.
latentsea
My son has played it for the last 3 years and this rings really true. He spends a lot of time dissing the CEO saying he's ruining it.
Aurornis
> Ask any kid who's grown up with the game.
I don’t have a kid who’s grown up with Roblox nearby to ask. Can you please explain what you mean?
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
“thing that was cool to kids is not cool anymore” is not a new phenomenon, and the onus is really on you to show the causation.
tailscaler2026
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?
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
sokoloff
There’s a large risk and hugely adversarial nature/motivation for predators to bypass whatever proactive filtering is put in place.
hluska
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.
codedokode
Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+? Aren't they all adult or in some countries children develop slower?
stebalien
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+
TheCoreh
This seems like a very reasonable system to ensure e.g. you and your classmate/friends can still interact as you grow up and switch age brackets. I wonder how families etc deal with it though? Can you play with your younger sibling/cousin? Is there some sort of parental approval/override?
dismalaf
US drinking age probably being used as a proxy for "adult-ness".
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
enceladus06
Yes but an 18yo can also buy a gun, get drafted into the military, and produce OF/porn.
But no alcohol.
amarant
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.
jihadjihad
Don’t forget the part where GP says they’re 25 years old (currently) and have spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on the platform.
mysterydip
Just a point of clarity (because I read that at first as well), they spent tens of thousands of robux, which are at a generic level 100:$1. So not as crazy as it sounds, still an investment.
vel0city
It doesn't seem surprising me they started playing at 7, and they were playing the game in 2008. I definitely recall the game taking off a good bit with little kids around that time. By like 2010 or so I knew of a ton of little kids who were at least aware of the game if they didn't play it themselves.
Game has been around for almost 20 years now.
bluefirebrand
Roblox is older than Minecraft...
isityettime
Why do I remember learning about Minecraft way earlier than learning about Roblox?
vintermann
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?
jjmarr
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.
lostapathy
My 9 year old got verified as 21+ somehow. He obviously doesn’t have a photo id, so there is no way to verify him as a child. Support refused to help. The whole system is insane.
vintermann
Exactly, but it's pretty clear adults can work around the automatic assignment (being adult makes you much better at figuring out how to fool such profiling systems). And the verification with ID is only good for proving that you're old, i.e. to keep kids out of adult spaces. It's no good for keeping adults out of kids spaces.
taejavu
What’s to stop a 40 year old from holding up a photo of their 15 year old self for the age verification camera?
jredwards
> But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
As a parent, my experience in discussion with other parents is: "Don't ever let your child onto Roblox, it is utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs."
From that perspective, I think most parents view the destruction of the platform as neutral to positive, and it suggests that the status quo would destroy the platform anyway.
Aeolun
Which parents do you talk with? The consensus around me seems to be that it’s fine as long as whatever you do on there is done with RL friends.
undefined
watwut
Most parents dont mind kids playing roblox games at all.
undefined
hluska
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.
subscribed
LOL, they literally said they want to play with other 18+ players alone. Without kids in the lobby, at all.
What are you, fun police? What's next, ban on bright coloured clothes?
sureglymop
You'd be surprised to know the sheer number of "experiences" and games people have created on roblox as the platform.
There are fps shooting games that are more playable/mature than your yearly call of duty/battlefield and all kinds of games for older age groups.
In that sense it's probably hard to "age out of it".
Aeolun
There’s a whole bunch of Roblox experiences clearly designed for adults. There’s dozens of us xD
I’m not sure if I’d say it’s better or worse, the games are higher quality because they need to be to keep an older adience engaged.
tailscaler2026
Roblox isn't a game, it's a platform. It has hundreds of millions of monthly users. A significant portion of those are 18+. And unsurprisingly there's plenty of games that target older audiences.
undefined
curiousObject
This is quite like saying that because you’ve “aged out” of high school, you must be suddenly cut off from interacting with all the friends you made in high school
IRL, you stay in touch with some of those old high school friends for years.
I don’t know if it’s the Roblox system deliberately trying to prevent players from maintaining contact outside the game with their friends? Or maybe just that the players haven’t foreseen the need to be ready for the abrupt cut in communication on their next birthday? (Happy Birthday!)
Sounds like a serious strategic error by Roblox though.
sieabahlpark
[dead]
sm0olr
You’re unlikely to convince an adult of that age who has willingly spent 10s of thousands of dollars on a children’s game that they maybe shouldn’t be playing it.
Dylan16807
Tens of thousands of robux. That's hundreds of dollars, reasonable for a long term player.
undefined
undefined
a2128
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.
skybrian
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.
Aurornis
This is an interesting comment because there’s a parallel effort to shift age verification to devices, which draws a lot of hate here.
subscribed
Because almost universally it's not an privacy-preserving age verification, but permanently deanonyming identification.
Please, let's keep it accurate.
ianm218
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?
irishcoffee
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.
darth_avocado
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.
mjr00
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.
doctorpangloss
They're not really choosing to do that though. They are completely beholden to the out of sight conversation weekly with Apple that led to changes in how users can spend - especially funds that Apple gets less of a cut of, like Robux gift cards.
Another POV is that Roblox is overvalued and it's just a matter of time before the fragility of its business, which is being a time waster for kids, falls apart like everything else in that space.
gizmondo
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.
darth_avocado
Actually, myopic market has provided me plenty of opportunities and has served as a great wealth building force for myself.
But setting that aside, my perspective was mostly around capital allocation from investors. Yes on a personal level you can make more money by investing companies, hollowing them out for profit, and fleeing before the company fails, like a lot of PE does. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing for the company or for the investor themselves on a long enough time horizon.
johndhi
Possible that there aren't measures that will actually achieve long-term safety while maintaining a highly popular platform?
Ferret7446
Or perhaps the investors know that the child safety measures will actually harm the product because the harm to children is a significant part of their product/profit
skybrian
Those profits, if they happen, will be delayed, so it means they aren't worth quite as much.
hypeatei
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.
undefined
colechristensen
It's not even quarterly thinking, it's castles in the sky speculation about what the market thinks the market will react to.
tech_hutch
"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.
fredoliveira
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
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
golem14
It’s time for me to re-read MOMO by Michael Ende.
edaemon
Maybe they edited their comment after you saw it, but they included a link to a video from the NYT YouTube channel.
hn_throwaway_99
That video is from the New York Times official account.
dlev_pika
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.
skybrian
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.
ro_bit
They have to head off the investor whos going to ask "is child safety bullish?"
JumpCrisscross
"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.
hn_throwaway_99
Don't you have it backwards?
Isn't Roblox inherently for children, hence they'd want to ban the adults?
JumpCrisscross
> 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...
throwaway5752
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.
bastard_op
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.
xboxnolifes
Because any social hotspot for children is going to be a pedophile farm. Its around because its popular, which is the same reason its a pedo farm.
htx80nerd
>"Before founding Roblox, he hosted a libertarian talk radio show for KSCO Radio Santa Cruz"
I am Jacks lack of surprise.
hokumguru
Regardless of Roblox’s continued failings I strongly believe that there needs to be a safe, scrutinized, and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways. As much as we would rather discontinue social media for minors the fact remains that for millions of Americans the internet provides a primary means of social fulfillment, especially in gaming, which is far more popular among youth demographics.
I think Roblox themselves have a chance in the coming years to prove themselves this space. They have one of the greatest chances to create this space precisely due to the intense scrutiny they’re currently under. It’s honestly that or fold basically. And if it’s not Roblox, what other platform do we trust our children on?
There have absolutely been growing pains since I regularly played games on the platform in ‘09-‘13 but I also credit Roblox extremely heavily in my journey as a software engineer making social games for me and my friends. It fostered that curiosity in a frankly healthy way for a young nerd that has eventually culminated in a job at FAANG and great academic fulfillment. I hope they can continue to provide this for millions of more children, just in a safer and healthier way.
themafia
> and open online platform for children to socialize in meaningful ways.
What benefits will this bring over an offline platform for children to socialize in? I'm not denying that there would be any, but, if we determine what those are directly, perhaps we can find better mechanisms than bespoke "social media" platforms to deliver them.
> I think Roblox themselves have a chance
It'd probably be a good start to subtract things like "virtual currency" from whatever implementation is imagined.
hokumguru
Children were online long before Roblox. They’ll be online regardless, let’s give them an actually safe space. I’d argue their platform is still better than Xbox live or msn chats
Fully agree on the currency aspect. I feel like since they’ve IPOd the company has taken more of a playing focus in where it was previously building and creating.
Aaronsood
Roblox is genuinely digging its own grave, the brainrot games made a huge chunk of its playerbase leave, then after the schlepp situation, added all that age verification stuff, and then most of the kids left too. Now there is just a fraction of its original players left playing.
hitekker
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.
JumpCrisscross
Hindenberg's 2024 report titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids": https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
jorams
And I assume this[1] is the reference to Backblaze? Notably not Hindenburg and more recent, but I believe there is some team overlap and there doesn't seem to be anything else.
dlev_pika
More safety = less sales, got it, nothing to worry about here, parents.
zetanor
The market valuates Roblox child abuse at almost a billion dollars?
tailscaler2026
Funny how the world abruptly decided kids shouldn't have social interactions online right as AI chatbots took off.
swiftcoder
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...
tailscaler2026
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.
fredoliveira
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.
heavyset_go
It's only with AI that user created content can be graded for age appropriateness/political inconvenience as it's uploaded to platforms in real-time.
lostlogin
Have a look how Nintendo do it. Their communications between players was (is?) very limited.
tailscaler2026
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.
philipallstar
What's heavily locked down?
intended
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.
cityofdelusion
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.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
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.