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Comment by flurdy | Hacker News Reader

I once worked for an online game aimed at children. With some limited messaging and a forum, we needed to automatically filter swearing especially when it started to reach millions of users.

The initial limited English only blacklists were useless. Kids are creative and terrible. So we replaced with big processes of failover with several external swearword filtering services. Costly...

But kids are creative..., they write single letter messages that circumvent any automated filtering. Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc. This font might have reduced the need for filtering. But kids are creative...

Thankfully it was not instant messaging. Direct near-instant messaging came in later products... Car-crash every time. Never write a messaging app for kids. There is always a mean-time-to-dickpick or worse.

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As soon as you start trying to automatically filter out messages you don't want, you enter an arms race that you're not going to win.

Surely a better solution is to provide the players with a way to votekick abusive users, and leave it at that?

Humans are basically symbolic representation generating machines. Trying to stop such a being from communicating ideas by limiting their available vocabulary in a particular language is short-sighted and massively underestimates humans in general. Maybe that's a fancy way of saying that the only thing that scales with the community is the community.

have you never played video games?

sure lets votekick someone from club penguin, im sure that wouldnt encourage cyber bullying and make matters worse

I've played a bit of https://skribbl.io/ recently and the votekick mechanism works very well for getting rid of people who just want to draw dicks and write swear words.

> Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc.

A whole Lego MMO was once cancelled because they couldn't come up with an automated way to detect such things in virtual Lego buildings and using employees to filter the content became too expensive.

I don't understand that at all. Just have a "warning to parents: this is a sandbox game and may feature any shape - including body parts - built from Lego". 99% of parents wouldn't be bothered, surely?

Every kid who has two opposite sex parents knows from toddler-hood what a penis and vulva look like, why is it such a problem??

But imagine telling your licensor "hey we had to put a warning that says players may see inappropriate body parts made out of Lego brand bricks".

That would go over like a lead ballon.

>Every kid who has two opposite sex parents knows from toddler-hood what a penis and vulva look like

I don't think this is true.

I was speaking loosely, Western socio-cultural background, ignoring edge cases (body image problems like 'never nudes' and such) .. maybe you're right ..

I found it interesting at c.5-6 yo that our kids brought home school slang (new words to me!) for genitalia: showing they were talking about it in a non-scientific context, strongly suggesting they were talking in some way about opposite-sex genitalia with peers.

A lot of creative examples from Roblox (which may be what is referred here, dunno) is the 'go commit die' subreddit. I'm sure a lot of that is creative trolls instead of actual kids, but still.

Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet introduced me to the term "TTP" (Time To Penis), as a measure of how long before somebody makes a penis in an online, user-content based videogame

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