This is an interesting debate to have somewhere, but it has nothing to do with this thread. We need to be careful about tangents like this, because it's a lot easier to have an opinion about the cut a platform should take from UGC than it is to have opinion about Raft, channel-based concurrency, and on-disk freelists. If we're not careful, we basically can't have the technical threads, because they're crowded out by the "easier" debate.
True, it is off topic to the postmortem. However, the top comment talks about wanting to work there. I get is is very relevant to see a bigger picture. Personally, I could never work for them. I have a kid and the services and culture they created around their product is sickening and should be made illegal.
Even so, if you're responding to the "wanting to work there" you could do so in a less snide manner that's more in line with HN's guidelines on constructive commenting.
You’ve pretty much articulated for me why I’ve been commenting on Reddit less and less frequently.
I loathe the constant riffing on <related and yet nothing indicates it is actually related/> topics.
Sadly it is happening here on HN too, < insert the next blurb about corporatism/>
Guess we need to find the next space lol
Took long enough to find this place.
While I personally think digitalengineer's comment was low-effort and knee-jerk, I think this general thread of discussion is on topic for the comment replied to, which was specifically about how the postmortem increased the commenter's respect for Roblox as a company and made them want to work there. I think an acceptable compromise between "ethical considerations drown out any technical discussion" and "any non-technical discussion gets downvoted/flagged to oblivion" would be to quarantine comments about the ethics of Roblox's business model to a single thread of discussion, and this one seems as good as any.
The guidelines and zillions of moderation comments are pretty explicit that doesn't count as 'on topic'. You can always hang some rage-subthread off the unrelated perfidy, real or perceived, of some entity or another. This one is extra tenuous and forced given that 'the type of company I'd want to work for' is a generic expression of approval/admiration.
You can get to a sane place just by mentally substituting "engineering team" for the word "company" in the original comment.
As one of the top developers on the platform (& 22 y/o, taught myself how to program through Roblox, ~13 years ago), I can say that it seems a majority of us in the developer community are quite unhappy with the image this video portrays. We love Roblox.
That's kind of on Roblox then for not answering their questions transparently.
I think what bothers me the most is the effective 'pay to play' aspect
My son loves it, I think it is a great way to learn.
Yeah as long as Roblox is exploiting children they're just flat-out not respectable. This video is a good look at a phenomenon most people are unaware of.
Players of your game creating content for it is not exploitation. It's just how it works in the gaming world. When I was a kid I spent time creating a minecraft mod that hundreds of people used. Did Mojang or anyone else ever pay me? No. I did it because I wanted to.
The way they're paying kids and what they're telling them is a big part of the problem... they're pushing a lot of the problematic game development industry onto kids that are sometimes as young as 10.
If this was free content creation when kids want to do it, then it would be an entirely different story.
Mojang was likely not selling you on making a mod with promises of making money though. Roblox did that, maybe they still do it.
Please review the video. The problem is not ‘players creating content’.