Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

"In addition to inflating the reported number of “people” on its platform, we also suspect Roblox massively inflates a second key metric, “engagement hours”."

Well maybe, but I have absolutely no doubt the engagement hours are still massive. Roblox is one of the main online destinations for kids these days, above even minecraft servers it seems.

The "paedophile hellscape" seems like a short-seller slur to me. No doubt there is some element of this on such a big platform, but it seems vastly overblown to me. I have yet to see anything really suspicious, with kids of my own, and also using roblox/roblox studio in coding clubs.

The payout % for creators, well that could be labelled a hellscape perhaps...

View on HN

> Roblox is one of the main online destinations for kids these days, above even minecraft servers it seems.

It really is. I don't play many video games these days, much less block-like games, so I always saw Roblox as a successful long-running title and not much more...up until I saw their public peering arrangements [0] and had my mind blown. Even if they massively inflate their playerbase, they're still huge - you don't just build out a multi-terabit network on a whim, and network operations aren't exactly the strong suit of most investors, so it's unlikely they would fake network capacity or build it out for show.

I wish we could properly compare Minecraft vs Roblox traffic, but the distributed nature of Minecraft multiplayer makes this quite difficult. A quick search on Google Scholar isn't showing much in the way of network volume, so it seems to be an unexplored/unexamined area.

[0]: https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/22697

Even if the engagement hours are massive, if they're not growing at the rate they claim, their stock price is not justified. They have not made a profit with their existing "massive" traffic, so the prospect of growing into something that is profitable is key to the case for their current stock price.

I have to agree on the other half of the headline, although if they're already unprofitable then there is a legit question of whether or not they can afford the amount of human oversight that every large platform (let alone a kid-oriented one) is going to require.

> No doubt there is some element of this on such a big platform, but it seems vastly overblown to me. I have yet to see anything really suspicious, with kids of my own

I'm not trying to suggest that you ban your children from the platform or anything, but this is really reminding me of all the deniers and apologists I've seen for Amazon and their working conditions in online discussion spaces (including on HN), in spite of the massive amounts of media harping on it. (I used to work in an FC.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com