This is a sympton of something worse. The bigger issue: Roblox isn’t the real problem, it’s filling the gap left by the disappearance of unstructured, unsupervised play in the physical world.
Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.
You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.
Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox
I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)
this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.
the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.
the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.
YES! This is a big piece of it. Fewer kids + more of them wanting to be inside / parents wanting them to be inside = less kids to play with = even less likelihood of them wanting to play outside.
This is like social media in reverse: nobody wants to be inside, but some people are only inside, so everybody is inside.
My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.
I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.
Last bit is not quite right: a lot of people want to be inside. That contributes strongly to the feedback loop you rightly identify.
(WHY they want to stay inside is another matter, but I suspect a large part is the stereotypical answer: unending seas of digital content highly optimised to hack the consumer's brain.)
If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still
loved playing it, but valuable perspective.
Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)
This is an easy argument to make, but I don't think it actually applies in any way. Roblox is just as popular in countries where these things have not disappeared.
All the listed countries have low fertility rates, increasing screentime rates, etc.
I suspect if you cornered a parent of a 2yo in any of those countries, they would not say it is meaningfully more social and child-friendly TODAY that the USA is, or Australia (for which I can speak) is.
I'm a parent in Norway (though not of a two year old). Children really do have a great deal of freedom and the country is very child friendly and safe. But still online games are displacing physical outdoor play. However the majority of children attend barnehage (kindergarten) where there are no screens and outdoor play is strongly encouraged (and only lightly supervised) so at least for pre-school children there is still a lot of physical activity.
Sorry for being blunt, isn't this mostly an US phenomen?
Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.
That sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect from tech's responsibility in that matter.
Decades ago, kids might have met in unsafe areas as well: maybe hang out in an abandoned building or whatever. But there wasn't yet a trillion dollar business deliberately creating abandoned buildings to hang out in.
Kids do not want to go outside. Even if parents want it and push for it, youtube, whatsapp, roblox, fortnite, whatever they have from steam is much more fun.
More accurately the kids you're aware of don't want to.
Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.
Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.
Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.
Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.
Kids want to go outside if other kids are outside. We are social animals, and the most addictive games for youth are glorified social networks. It helps if other parents in the area are on the same page.
Yeah I was periodically booted out. My only gripe with it is there were few others around. My closest friend and I mostly played video games in the living room.
While those may or may not be issues, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Child abuse and pedophilia has been a scourge on children since at least Ancient Greek times when it was well documented and I’m sure even longer than that.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
> or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased.
Slight pushback on this. The web has been spammed with subpar tutorials for ages now. The kind of medium "articles" that are nothing more than "getting started" steps + slop that got popular circa 2017-2019 is imo worse than the listy-boldy-emojy-filled articles that the LLMs come up with. So nothing gained, nothing lost imo. You still have to learn how to skim and get signals quickly.
I'd actually argue that now it's easier to winnow the slop. I can point my cc running in a devcontainer to a "tutorial" or lib / git repo and say something like "implement this as an example covering x and y, success condition is this and that, I want it to work like this, etc.", and come back and see if it works. It's like a litmus test of a tutorial/approach/repo. Can my cc understand it? Then it'll be worth my time looking into it. If it can't, well, find a different one.
I think we're seeing the "low hanging fruit" of slop right now, and there's an overcorrection of attitude against "AI". But I also see that I get more and more workflows working for me, more or less tailored, more or less adapted for me and my uses. That's cool. And it's powered by the same underlying tech.
The thing is, what is the actual point of this approach? Is it for leaning? I strongly believe there’s no learning without inmersion and practice. Is it for automation? The whole idea of automation is to not think about the thing again unless there’s a catastrophic error, it’s not about babysitting a machine. Is it about judgment? Judgment is something you hone by experiencing stuff then deciding whether it’s bad or not. It’s not something you delegate lightly.
The problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before.
The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.
Even using tooling to filter articles doesn't scale as slop grows to be a larger and larger percentage of content, and it means I'm going to have to consider prompt injections and running arbitrary code. All of this is a race to the bottom of suck.
> The problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before. The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.
The term I like is that AI has _industrialised_ those behaviours. While native hunted buffalo, it wasn't destructive until it was industrialised [1] it that it became truly destructive.
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement
The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations.
Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.
Marketing departments are already speaking of GEO - generative engine optimization. When a user asks an AI for the best X, you want it to say your X is the best, and you'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.
granted it's not up to courtroom standards, this post linked by another commenter in the chain does paint the picture pretty well of an internal struggle between Search and Ads inside Google as a company, where there was a decision to promote user-negative changes to Search as a way to increase the total number of searches performed, thereby increasing the number of ads that can be shown. This happened during 2019.
Google was unable or unwilling to fight people gaming their SEO to float garbage and blogspam to the top results, waay before these more specific policy change events that have been reported w.r.t intentionally making search worse.
I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.
Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.
In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
>These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Of course, it's hard to "objectively" prove that they literally made search worse, but it's clear they were fine with stagnating in order to maximize ad revenue.
I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm. Meanwhile, it can be so bad for Google that directly searching for a blog title at times can leave me unsuccessful.
> I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm
Yes, in the case of Google:
- They make more money from ads if the organic results are not as good (especially if it's not clear they're add)
- They get more impressions if you don't find the answer at the first search and have to try a different query
This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives.
If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads.
Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.
When I get a full time job, Kagi is the first thing I'm buying a subsciption for. It's not perfect, but I want to at least show a demand. I'm willing to contribute premiums for proper services that won't mine all my data and is actually beholden to customers
> In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
"SEO" is not some magic, it is "compliance with ranking rules of the search engine". Google wanted to make their lives easier, implemented heuristics ranking slop higher, resulting in two things happening simultaneously: information to slop ratio decreasing AND information getting buried deeper and deeper within SRPs.
> do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en-...
Google is literally rewriting the queries. Not only results with better potential for ads outrank more organic results, it is impossible to instruct the search engine to not show you storefronts even if you tried.
Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.
I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait
"here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question
It's also not the question I asked. I'm literally trying to parse out what question was asked. That's what makes AI slop so infuriating: it's entirely orthogonal to the information I'm after.
Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag
name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program
that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is
ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait
Except that the AI slop Google and Microsoft and DDG use for summaries masks whether or not a result is SEO nonsense. Instead of using excerpts of the page the AI summary simply suggests that the SEO garbage is answering the question you asked. These bullshit AI summaries make it infinitely harder to parse out what's actually useful. I suppose that's the goal though. Hide that most of the results are low quality and force you to click through to more pages (ad views) to find something relevant. AI slop changes the summaries from "garbage in, garbage out" to simply "garbage out".
At least with Google, it quotes the pages where it gets the information from. Also, I think you are definitely underplaying the fact that it answers the question in one sentence,as wellas the whole ask a question get a compact answer. I am going to need a concrete example, because in my experience, the AI summary has never even required me to verify the source except out of curiosity, much less click on any search results.
Before Google the web was already full of SEO slop. Except "SEO" just meant "put a list of popular keywords in a block hidden with CSS". That was the time of Altavista and other search engines.
So the time you're talking about is a window when Google existed, but before they gave up on fighting spam.
Sadly these aren't monkeys. These are more like termites eating at any and all wood they can find. They'll eat at the foundation and move to the next trend to eat at.
Spam by its nature is low effort, low yields anyway. They don't particularly care about making scraps since their pipeline is nearly automated.
I was searching a specific niche on Youtube today, and scrolled endlessly trying to find something that wasn't AI generated. Youtube is being completely spammed.
On that - naive proposition; shouldn't we establish say "humanTube" - service which would strictly prohibit AI content? With all this AI slop engulfing our web 2.0 - maybe this is the time and place to establish the new web for "nerds" i.e. people who care for the real thing? Just as our current web once was a place for scientists and engineers mostly, maybe we now need something as this? I feel the flaws in my own point, but maybe it's not all hopeless?
I think by this point that premium services dedicated to quality is going to be the way to avoid the flood of AI slop that's come to us. Premium services mean QA and accountability should anything try to slip through.
Closest thing in the YT space would be Nebula, but Nebula's scope is very narrow (by design).
We'll get content that is indistinguishable from human curated content before long, we might even already have that and it's just toupee fallacy making us only see the slop. I'm making no value statement here, just that any sort of curation attempts are probably futile.
It's not even a point, it barely counts as sarcasm. I'm not sure why a chunk of hello world in ARM assembler is supposed to be relevant to anything, let alone if there's a trap hidden in there.
I assume GP's point was that assembly language literacy was a pointless skill nowadays. I found it quite useful, precisely because it's no longer an ubiquitous skill, so you can shine with your expertise in some situations.
>Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website.
What weitendorf posted is definitively not a library, nor is there a small tutorial for the code.
>Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality.
Considering the low effort to post and high effort to understand what weitendorf wrote, he might be considered a spammer given the context. The code quality is also low since his application can easily be replicated by a bunch of echo calls in a bash script, making me lean towards thinking he is a low quality spammer, given the context.
>All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
I'm not sure you can argue that weitendorf sufficiently addressed this. He put too much emphasis on an obvious strawman (real programmer) which is completely out of context. Nobody is questioning here whether someone is a programmer or not. There is no gatekeeping whatsoever. You're free to use LLMs.
I'll also complain about your use of "salient" here, which generally has two meanings. The first is that something is "eye catching" (making me think more of spam), the second meaning is "relevancy/importance" to a specific thing and that's where weitendorf falls completely flat.
Now you might counter and argue that he packaged all of his salient points inside the statement "want to lay off bread-and-butter red-blooded american programmers", then your position is incredibly weak, because you're deflecting from one strawman to another strawman or alternatively, your counterargument will rely heavily on reinterpretation, which again just means the point wasn't salient.
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Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part?
My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
> Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
You’re underselling this. Running it locally also gives you access to all cores and all RAM. Wasm is very limited comparatively - perf is not even close.
Great phrase. "social media is barely a sharing platform anymore.. its just decentralized long-tailed broadcast media." really captures the essence of what is happening.
I'm less confident. Your description highlights a real problem but this particular solution looks like an attempt to shoe horn a technical solution to a political people problem. It feels like one of these great ideas that years later results in 1000s of different decoders, breakages and a nightmare to maintain. Then someone starts an initiative to move decoding from being bundled and to instead just defining the data format.
Sometimes the best option is to do the hard political work and improve the standard and get everyone moving with it. People have pushed parquet and arrow. Which they are absolutely great technologies that I use regularly but 8 years after someone asked how to write parquet in java, the best answer is to use duckdb: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47355038/how-to-generate...
Not having a good parquet writer for java shows a poor attempt at pushing forward a standard. Similarly arrow has problems in java land. If they can't be bothered to consider how to actually implement and roll out standards to a top 5 language, I'm not sure I want them throwing WASM into the mix will fix it.
I've probably spent 400+ hours a year sharing content because I wanted to. However the wanted to, was partially because of the good feeling i got from knowing I was helping semi-specific people and then later meeting those people. It's sparked numerous interesting friendships and discussions. That latter part will no longer happen as the AI sits in the middle and becomes the known source. It has massively put me off creating more content. I wasn't creating content to generically help humanity move forward, I did it to help people similar to me facing particular situations. As that becomes diluted, the incentives won't hold to the same degree.
After AI scrape the ad free content, they'll probably turn around and show end users the AI summary with Ads. It never ends. The problem is a much deeper flaw at the heart of capitalism. Enshitification of everything.
It's as great as it ever was. I like it as its very stable and has a good model of interaction but if you want a modern embeddable map or embeddable chart stick with web interfaces. If you do go with swing definitely check out flatlaf to make it look modern.
Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.
You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.
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