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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

When my oldest kid was young, I was on Linux. I tried a few times to get it to work so I could play with him but never could get it to run quite right. Because I couldn't play with him, Roblox itself became a constant source of arguments. Hours-long shouting and crying kind of arguments. All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox because of it.

When my youngest started playing, my older kid immediately got through to him to forget about Robux and just play the games. By then, I was back on Windows and was able to play with him. We have tons of fun as a nightly routine and he's even using Roblox Studio to build cool stuff and even does a little bit of programming. I absolutely love it.

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Everything on Roblox is gamified to suck as much money out of kids as possible.

When my kid was using Roblox several years ago, all the games were made by kids. Nowadays all of the game developers moved from phone apps to Roblox. There’s no way I’m letting my kid get addicted to their tactics which are very effective, especially on kids.

> All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox because of it.

I would suggest a (re)watch of this pair of videos from People Make Games:

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

Any parent that lets their kids play this is a bad parent.

"As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16" (wikipedia)

Some also say, that those parents who cut off their kids from their friends are bad parents.

Parenting is about compromises and pure and clean solution only rarely exists. So yes, roblox is bad, as is facebook, tiktok and co. but banning it all and isolating your children is maybe not the perfect solution either.

My kids are not yet in the age of that crap, but soon there will surely be tough decisions to be made.

So maybe be careful with judging someone as a "bad parent", before being in that position yourself.

Did you actually watch both of those videos in their entirety before posting that?

If you haven't yet, you may want to delete your comment out of shame after you do. Unless you have as little shame as a parent or care for your own children as do all the pedos and white supremacists and scammers operating on that platform.

You be you, but I'm sorry for your kids.

Nope, I did not. But read aweful stuff before about roblox and I think I said clearly that I think the plattform is crap and not that I have any intentions of hooking up my kids to it. My point was about moralist "judgement".

"Unless you have as little shame as a parent or care for your own children's wellbeing as do all the pedos and white supremacists and scammers operating on that platform."

So what about the rest of the internet and the real world? It is not exactly that they are free of those people.

Absolute protection means absolute isolation. So still my question: do you think it is good for kids, if all their friends meet on roblox and only they are not allowed and become isolated? Parenting in reality means compromises. So I do not know, how I will decide if I would come into that situation, but I know that it is always easier to judge from the outside. Or do you have kids in roblox age?

When you have a kid of Roblox age (I assume you don't) you will feel the pressure from all other kids already playing. Your kid may even get a robux card at a birthday without your consent. If you pushback you will be the annoying parent and your kids social life will suffer. Then you will likely readjust your position.

Wow. Thank you for posting those links. I just watched those two videos in their entirety, which Roblox wishes were taken down.

They raise MUCH BIGGER issues than "intentionally blocking Linux with Wine", which is actually a GOOD thing insofar as it helps protect Linux users from being exploited.

It would be even better for society if Roblox blocked all Windows and Mac users.

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