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  • Implying that the “childrens” websites of the early 00’s weren’t fraught with sexual innuendo and swearing, and home to predators of all kinds. Neopets, Club Penguin, Habbo, RuneScape, IMVU. I don’t think this poster is remembering them the way that they were.

    I will say that growing up with these sites, and exposure to some of these things, I have become a savvier citizen of the internet. I understand wanting to protect kids, but they have to get out there on the real Internet someday, and losing all your rare painted neopets to a scammer makes you real unlikely to give your details to someone claiming to be your bank.

    • I don't remember much innuendo on the sites I played as a child (club penguin, bin weevils) although I've got vague memories that the censoring was so severe you could learn swear words based off seemingly innocent words being blocked out of the chat. The bigger issue at that age was how exploitative some of those sites were with microtransactions and I can only imagine it's gotten worse with the current MMO's for kids.

      There was one I briefly played as a child where one of the starting missions was growing something in a garden but if you were a free playing customer you had to plant in the public garden and wait 24 hours, so I'd come back the next day and find someone had stolen the stuff I'd grown and couldn't progress. It was a weird way to learn about wealth inequality and the privileges wealthier kids got at the age of seven.

      There was another site advertised on one of the kids TV channels here when I was younger that encouraged kids to sign up and mark off the chores they'd completed and each chore you completed netted you a prize like a trip to Disneyland. What the ad didn't tell us at that young age was that your parents would have to pay for the prizes through the sites affiliate link. I think I was at least mature enough by that stage to understand we'd been had and it wasn't my parents fault but it's crazy that nearly twenty years later the internet's somehow gotten worse for exploiting kids for micro transactions.

    • True, moderation was never perfect...

      But nowadays no one is even trying.

      The methods that all of most of those places ... learned they needed to develop and implement?

      Basically that has all been forgotten now, skimped on.

      Its ... really easy, to develop a kid themed game or app, and just remove text chat, and replace it with a clever gamut of canned messages and emotes (as in player animations).

      You can even make basically, chainable, combined sets of messages of phrases, like a 'do you have a' and then a list of vetted objects... or 'go to the' and then places, etc.

      Yep, thats not perfect, people will get clever and lewd with it, but its way, way more controlled, and still allows a good deal of free expression.

      (Fuck, at this point I think you could make a decent case for just making that kind of thing a lot more widespread, given the just dogshit insanity that is most games chat lobbies...)

      You do that, and at least in your own game, you probably dont have a way of luring a kid to some specific off site, out of game thing.

      This is just like with anti-cheat measures:

      100% safety and security is impossible.

      But that doesn't mean there are not reasonable and maybe clever ways to come up with a paradigm for balancing safety and functionality.

  • don't forget prime which is an energy drink whose ads target primary school kids

  • I still play Neopets every day. It's been excellent for my mental health and it's the most wholesome community I've ever been a part of.

  • Concerns with Roblox are not new. For years there have been allegations and lawsuits around the exploitation of children developing effectively for free so the company can make bank. There's even been investigative journalism programs and articles about it.

    Roblox exploits children.

61 comments