Roblox has no ethics as a company and a community

Thanks to Mark for sharing about Roblox, it gave me the nudge to write some notes about it, a habit I want to get into a bit more.

Here's the video which I'd really recommend watching:

The TL;DR is

The Roblox community has some serious moderation issues. Along with all the gambling for children and exploitation O_o

Yes, we could say that this is the way of the internet. We can't control what happens in other areas. Perhaps there is that...to some extent.

However, there are some core problems here:

  • the audience are children, even my children in this instance
  • when moderation becomes hard they choose not to invest in community or moderation
  • this means they are choosing not to protect the majority of their audience
  • their audience who are children and vulnerable
  • there seems to be no accountability or protection for the developers who invest time into building games
  • and this isn't even tapping into the gambling aspect Roblox encourage

Some other highlights:

  • Roblox encourages kids to make games on their platform to only pass on a very small fraction of the revenue that the games make.
  • There were concerns on how roblox was treating their creators and that kids were being exploited.
  • However, this news was only scratching the surface. Roblox pressured People Make Games to remove their first video.
  • There's a whole culture where unregulated managers Developers or games were often pushed out as games got more successful, instead of revenue shares people would push out people and try to offer them money as an employee.
  • The culture overall seems like one of fear to speak out.
  • Moderation is hard. It is thought that their forum shut down due to one user linking to a sexual abuse site.
  • Now, as a result, you can find the community scattered across Discord, YouTube, Twitter. Even the Roblox developer forums are very quiet compared to other Discord servers.
  • The lack of investment in that this doesn't happen on roblox.com means that Roblox washes their hands from the responsibility.
  • There is no Roblox out reach program for developer abuse.
  • The way Roblox is structured is that users can take unilateral control over the games and the revenue those games bring in.
  • Talking about what your boss did to you on the official Roblox developer platform falls under the category of harassment.
  • Roblox claim that banned users can't continue to monetize, but in this has been proven to be incorrect in the case of Sonic.

Other news posts talking about Roblox issues:

A screenshot of part of Roblox's moderation guidelines
Closure of Roblox forum
Roblox didn't provide a response to these questions.
Stock responses to questions.
This user continues to make money despite being banned.
Trading history of virtual items
Almost a decade of a Roblox Black Market
Roblox Blackmarket is an important part of the economy
Roblox Blackmarket β€” no one is talking about

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