Petition to remove Roblox CEO reaches 100k signatures amid child safety concerns : pcgaming

[-] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 61 points 3 months ago

Let's get MasterCard on the case

[-] barnaclebutt@lemmy.world 15 points 3 months ago

Give them a call and ask them why they support child abuse.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 58 points 3 months ago

Oh, wow, that's almost 0.1% of their daily users. He's probably quaking in his boots.

I'm less confused about this happening than I am about how successfully Roblox has flown under the radar. People do not realize how big it is or how it works, and they seem not just happy to keep it that way, but actively concerned with maintaining that low profile.

[-] RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works 44 points 3 months ago

Petitions like these are made to raise awareness of the issue. That's a win even if only a tiny fraction of their userbase are involved.

[+] MudMan@fedia.io -6 points 3 months ago

No.

I mean, size matters. Tiny gestures that don't do anything are useless by definition.

This petition isn't even to regulate the platform or addressed to any regulatory body. As far as I can tell it's just complaining about Roblox at Roblox.

Go after British regulators. Australian regulators. They sure seem willing to overreach under the guise of "will somebody think of the children". Asking Roblox's CEO to remove Roblox's CEO sure seems like somebody would like the game to run the way they like but not for it to be removed or meaningfully changed to alter the real issues with it. It sounds like pointless whining to me, and I don't even make any money out of this thing.

In the meantime, you are trying to convince a person to quit their extremely lucrative job by asking them nicely. Assuming the founder, CEO and single largest individual shareholder of the company needs to see, what? 10-20% of its userbase actually do something before he thinks he's in trouble you only need to do get this a hundred to two hundred times larger for it to get noticed. More, if he's stubborn. You may as well write a sternly written letter and flush it down the toilet.

If you want Roblox to change how it operates the people who can get that done are elected officials and regulators.

[-] ganryuu@lemmy.ca 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

What @RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works was talking about was awareness, and you said no then proceeded to talk about something else entirely. It does raise awareness, as shown by the fact that we are talking about it.

[+] MudMan@fedia.io -10 points 3 months ago

There are 17 comments in this thread as of this writing, half of which are me ranting about it and a bunch of others being people unhelpfully telling a concerned parent to google what it's about if they don't know why Roblox is bad.

As far as I can tell his has increased awareness by one person. That is much, much less than 0.01%.

If you want awareness of the people that matter you want to get to the mianstream press, who have way more reach than Change.org, particularly with that demographic.

Once again, this is very ineffectual on all stated goals. Whehter that's by design or through incompetence I can't tell.

[-] ganryuu@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 months ago

By design? Man I need me some of that tinfoil...

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

trust me it's real easy to OD. try easier metals like aluminium foil before you work yourself all the way up to tin

[-] BreadOven@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. In the off chance you're not, tinfoil is a colloquialism for aluminum foil (at least in North America), so I don't think OP actually means tin foil.

If it was sarcasm, please disregard.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

we're talking about hats sir

[-] BreadOven@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

My (pirate) hat is made from only the finest newspaper I found on the street.

[+] MudMan@fedia.io -6 points 3 months ago

By design in that, as I said above, this doesn't seem like a serious attempt to generate any change but rather a bit of a tantrum from users that don't necessarily want meaningful changes to the crap Roblox does.

Think more Modern Warfare 2 boycott than "EU regulators looking into loot boxes".

Considering that the whole thing stems from drama stirred by Roblox streamers and youtubers who make a living from Roblox itself I'm not feeling particularly tinfoily.

[-] Lightfire228@pawb.social 5 points 3 months ago

The design was to stir up negative press

And by the fact that there was an article posted about it within a day of the petition starting, I'd say it was pretty successful

[-] MudMan@fedia.io -4 points 3 months ago

No, it wasn't.

Look, I know big numbers are hard and human brains don't want to parse them, but come on.

You're talking about an article on Dexerto, a medium that I'm sure has done great work between its founding and my just realizing they exist right now. There are a few other articles online, most in smaller sites or in aggregators.

You are talking about a massive social-media-meets-gaming-platform the size of Twitter on a good day, orders of magnitude bigger than the reach any of this crap got. This is nothing. It's a PR stunt from a few youtubers, which I hate that I have now focused on enough to understand.

I agree that it's designed to drum up attention. Just not that this attention is meant to be effective at anything at all beyond, one suspects, driving viewership, because it sure as hell isn't targeting anything that may cause any action.

Maybe this is why people don't pay attention to Roblox despite being as large as Steam. The dissonance is just too large. It sucks, because despite the remarkable trivialization of the issue there should be way more eyeballs on this. Real eyeballs. Eyeballs attached to hands holding pens that can sign proper regulations, or at least scare some knee-jerky intermediaries.

Somehow a thousand assholes with customer support addresses managed to ban half of the smut on Steam, but these people figured out they'd gather a hundred times as many signatures and point them at the one person in the entire planet guaranteed to ignore them.

I am tired. I don't want to think about this anymore.

[-] Lightfire228@pawb.social 6 points 3 months ago

The guy who started the petition said the petition is purely to get headlines and negative press about Roblox, to hopefully drive investors away from the platform

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

He did address it to the single largest individual investor. Unfortunately that also happens to be the one guy he's supposed to be trying to get fired.

Guessing he's not going to be game, and I doubt the multiple investment groups making billions out of this thing are much more concerned, especially since despite this information beign publicly available, none of them are even mentioned in the petition itself either.

The fact that people keep linking me to this guy's video only reinforces my suspicion that getting traffic to this guy's Roblox-focused Youtube channel is far more of a goal here.

[-] azzxe@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

quaking in the boots have me dying 😂

[-] ech@lemmy.ca 37 points 3 months ago

Can we remove Roblox? Just...all of it?

[-] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 9 points 3 months ago

Yeah, make kids play half-dead MMOs that will get shut down in two years, I went through that and turned out fine! /s

[+] obrien_must_suffer@lemmy.world 31 points 3 months ago

[deleted]

[-] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 17 points 3 months ago

We banned it because it was mindless nonsense and everything tried to sell you something. Had no idea about all this child safety stuff.

[-] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago

What do they think you're going to inevitably cave on next, letting the kids ride around without seat belts? Jfc just tell the kid no.

[+] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

[deleted]

[-] Nightlight17776@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 months ago

Okay, I have a child. Can someone please explain to me what why this is a concern. I really want to know

[-] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 42 points 3 months ago

Roblox uses children as unpaid labour to produce content for their platform, as well as the risk your kid runs into nazis or pedophiles on the platform. That used to be rampant, not sure if they've managed to get a grip on that now.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 30 points 3 months ago

TLDR, Roblox is effectively a heavily monetized game development and social media platform aimed at and run by children.

Effectively a huge treadmill of NFTs for underage users where they're encouraged to make, buy and sell content to each other. And because millions of them log in every day also a remarkable honey pot for people wanting to interact with that audience as a bonus.

Most evidence out there is that Roblox management either actively generates this situation or is very much okay with it.

So basically if you don't want your kids on social media unsupervised (or working for a billionaire for free) this is probably not the right place for them to be.

And granted, those are genuine "ifs". You may not have a problem with them being in those sorts of online spaces, and learning game development via Roblox isn't necessarily a bad thing. The lack of mainstream awareness about what's actually in there may be the more genuinely disturbing thing about Roblox in the first place.

[-] Lightfire228@pawb.social 7 points 3 months ago

Here's a really good video from the guy who started the petition

[-] dil@piefed.zip 5 points 3 months ago

dont let them on vrchat, i judge the fk out of every parent allowing kids on there

[-] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 3 points 3 months ago

Back when vr was pretty new abd even more niche than now. I heard VR chat is vool so i tried it. Ho-ly shit, it was all small people with squeeky voices. Like at least 90%. People spend like 800 dollars for a headset to keep their kids busy with complete strangers

[-] dil@piefed.zip 1 points 3 months ago

Vrchat has some interesting stuff forsure, got me interested in unity and blender, but most of my time there was spent solo trying out worlds/avatars, some ppl remade full game character with all their abilities using unity particles, was cool to learn and try to make anime attacks (i never tested them in vr, looked great on the preview on my monitor, terrible in vr, you need to use meshes)

[-] dil@piefed.zip 1 points 3 months ago

Concepts great, think s@box's sandbox mode will pull it off better for what I want, just a social sandbox that can be played flat/vr letting ppl make stuff in game and outside of it.

[-] BigTrout75@lemmy.world -2 points 3 months ago

Found this. https://m.imdb.com/es/news/ni65429148/

If you enable parent controls, it's probably safe, but hell,I didn't know.

[-] amzd@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Ngl if 100k people thought I was doing a bad job I’d quit yesterday

[-] datavoid@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 months ago

And that's why you aren't a billionaire

[-] TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

That's one of the reasons.

[-] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 1 points 3 months ago

But 10 million think you do a banging job.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 3 months ago

10 million would be nice.

Try 100 million.

Roblox is a LOT bigger than people think.

The smallest game in Roblox's top 10 as I write this would be on Steam's top 10 by concurrent users. That's above GTA V. The number one game on Roblox would be number 1 on Steam, ahead of CounterStrike 2 by a factor of 2.

I mean a LOT bigger.

[-] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

What's the chances the CEO is a pedophile?

[-] Killer57@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

Statistically about 1/6

[-] azzxe@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

i hope the new ROBLOX CEO can do better then this

[+] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

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