Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!

Oh, also - largely with you on Robux. I mean I don’t have a problem with it in principle, ideally it lets kids (through their parents) effectively choose which games and creators to support, and there have lately been some big games with big frequent updates that kids have found to be super enjoyable. Like, content updates at rates traditional games would be embarrassed by.

But like all things involving $, I’m sure there’s lots of eventual exploitation. And manipulation of kids to want to buy is definitely bad. But then again, by my measure, kids need to be instructed on recognizing and resisting precisely that from a young age. That manipulation is everywhere and getting worse all the time.

You’re probably right, I’ve once or twice (from an older account) asked a user to elaborate or give specifics, after they’d made some wild claims about safety, never gotten anything.

I do know of at least one truly hideous group of people using the platform as communication and recruitment to some really horrendous (life ruining) stuff, maybe this article references that too. But again, that’s a problem of sufficiently large user bases (especially of kids). Among millions of users it’s mathematically not realistic to prevent every possible group in the size of dozens from congregating to attempt their awful shit. Motivated humans are good at overcoming even well-designed systems.

We’re certainly right to care about safety though, and I do want to know if Roblox is less safe than I imagine.

Roblox chat is so restrictive that it routinely makes it difficult to talk about normal things. My daughter has spent a ton of time on Roblox (while being prohibited from many other things including unfettered YouTube, for context) and I really don’t see what the fuss is about. I’ve played with her on and off for years, it has always struck me as a generally safe platform, and I’m both sensitive and clued in about the topic.

Anything with user numbers like Roblox is going to attract the darkest corners of the internet, that’s unavoidable. It doesn’t strike me that there’s anything particularly dangerous about Roblox beyond that fact, they seem to manage it well and actually the platform seems pretty safe all things considered.

Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it’s even a little worse though, it’s like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.

Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I’d argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.

Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.

And certainly never trust YouTube’s curation, ever, agreed.

4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.

I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don’t really restrict the time they spend at all.

YEAH MF, congrats, now your brain is malwared to fuck, you shouldn’t have looked at it dead on. Limewire is best treated like a Medusa… whose effects show up later.

Guaranteed 10 years earlier dementia onset at a minimum, probably some strokes that leave you “revealing” family secrets invented out of whole cloth by the w4r3z in your now-compromised, botnet brain.

Sorry, Limewire was a wild ride. Could just be the way memories work, but looking back, I think Limewire delivered what I actually tried to download <50% of the time, maybe <30% by the time I stopped using it.

Napster was super dope (and, oddly enough, accidentally produced a solid way for me to buy drugs from the hood, lmao), and Soulseek was absolutely delicious, but - alas.

Yeesh. I’ve been (blessedly) away from MS for a bit now so I’m kind of catching up / watching the carnage from afar.

When you jack up veteran user workflows so much that it makes the OS feel alien…you’re really just daring people to jump OS. I know it’s not that simple for work environments, but I can’t imagine administering this sloppy mess has gotten any easier, so…gonna be fun waiting for the suits to eventually catch up I guess.

I’m really starting to wonder if they just might fuck up their products so badly it fucks up their insanely strong market position enough to be replaced.

MS used to be more careful with the corporate/ enterprise side. Some notable exceptions of course, the tiles-only “mobile-tap-first” interface of 8 was rough on users, but forcing that on their server 2012 OS was an abomination.

But the stuff outta MS lately is just nutso.

I played a buncha Vampire Survivors around that phase lol, just need one hand for the controls. Football cradle baby, hold bottle in that same hand (does require some wrist flexibility), other hand & arm free.

That hold doesn’t help with wiggles of course (and maybe you already use it) but at least you can pause VS.

Depending on state, you may need to defeat varying regional wildlife (at least one full game with multiple generous DLCs, spanning the US) in order to complete the journey, and this does accrue XP as one might expect.

It does also produce players attached to min-maxed builds to adhere to one or another strategy, so play the meta-game carefully.

Goddamn inflation…

I just bought two oldish business class Dell laptops this last week and put Bazzite on em both, for the fam. Easing out our Chromebooks we’ve used for minor things, just can’t abide a machine that won’t let me actually own it anymore, with the way the world’s going.

Not exactly revolutionary lol, but your enthusiasm demanded something in response, so I wanted to let you know that we (and I bet lots of others!) are all in. And I really hope you keep doing stuff like this!!

If I haven’t contributed something to Lutris by this year’s Hacktoberfest, by golly I’m committing (heh) to putting an open issue to rest during best month.

Cheers and thanks again!!

Apologies I’m so late, didn’t really have anything to add. But I’ve noticed your comments since this wee little exchange more and more, esp. on db0, and I like how you get down.

Sell me on PieFed if you feel like it!

And the only way election reform happens is if we get the corporate Dems who like things the way they are (AKA roughly all of them) out of power. It’s damn near hopeless.

I’d commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. I’d have to go Ultra, though, no question.

The extreme timescales, the highly personal, self-driven body modification, culminating in a truly unique, grotesque sort of personality to one’s own body…one which can’t help but physically, visibly project the creeping, gibbering paranoia nurtured by millennia spent slowly becoming so estranged from every other lifeform once called kin, making one’s journey through time and space utterly, irreversibly alone, even when traveling with others…

For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game, on the other hand, I’d be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora’s box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and long-forgotten exotic physics…not to mention, who knows who or what has been lurking just beyond perception, waiting for you to do the risky dirty work of extracting some particularly nasty doodad…

One can dream.

I can say I’m personally very interested in knowing about what degrees and topics of censorship are occurring on various large Lemmy instances. I’m thankful for this post, I wouldn’t have known otherwise. Not trying to start an argument or dunk on you, just registering a different perspective.

Now this is top tier pedantry, ya love to see it.

Edit: if you would’ve subtly but deliberately screwed up that idiom, this would be elevated to a true masterpiece

Billy Mays did pass into the Great Beyond, after all…that guy could sell some As Seen on TV omnipotence to a whole pantheon of deities, I’m sure of it.