Dangers In Your Child's Online World
The dark side of Roblox, leveling up, and more in this week's digest.
If you’re my age, at best you’ve probably only heard the name Roblox, but it’s a video gaming environment that’s huge among teenagers. As New York magazine reports, it also has a dark side to it.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its primitivism, tens of millions of people around the planet love Roblox deeply, sincerely, and with more zeal than anyone loves just about anything else on the internet, their obsession spilling over into YouTube fan accounts, conferences, meetups, and a thriving industry of third-party coding studios. The platform’s popularity is staggering. In 2020, as Facebook continued to watch its share of the global adolescent attention span slide, Roblox told Bloomberg that “two-thirds of all U.S. kids between 9 and 12 years old use Roblox, and it’s played by a third of all Americans under the age of 16.” This year, Roblox reported 111.8 million average daily active users. Like many budding tech companies, it has yet to turn a profit, but it estimates it will end 2025 with around $4.5 billion in revenue and has a market capitalization of nearly $90 billion.
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Like any platform synonymous with children, Roblox has become associated with their predation. According to data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek, between 2018 and 2024, more than two dozen adults have been arrested on suspicions of abducting or abusing victims they met or groomed using Roblox. In one notorious case, a New Jersey man was sentenced to 15 years in prison after Ubering a 15-year-old girl he’d met on Roblox to his home, where he repeatedly sexually abused her. In recent months, Roblox’s stock has been buffeted by reports that it will soon face hundreds of lawsuits alleging that it has facilitated the sexual exploitation of minors, even as it touts a raft of new safety features to protect children. Furthermore, because many of its games are created by children who often see little or no remuneration, Roblox has been accused of being a largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar child-labor operation.
These are serious problems. The bad headlines, however, can obscure other issues that may not be as sensational but are nonetheless widespread, affecting the teeming millions of children who hang out unsupervised in this vast playground. Despite heightened awareness of the dangers the screen life poses to children, parents seem largely unaware that Roblox is a wholly different animal from the usual smart-phone addiction. It’s a place where some of the most insidious trends of the contemporary internet — gambling, compulsive distraction, mindless consumption, and overall enshittification — have hardened into governing realities.
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And there’s so much more: a virtual universe besieged by corporations and advertisers looking not only to make money but to embed themselves deep in children’s psyches. Even a few hours spent in the game’s various and ever-multiplying worlds is enough to make the shopping malls of old look like a Quaker youth retreat. The Robloxverse is a vision of hallucinatory hypercapitalism that dazzles and entertains as it extracts money from the young and inexperienced and impatient, immersing them in a degraded iteration of the internet where slop and the market and social media are totally integrated. Roblox’s legions of devoted fans see no such thing — only a chance to play, chat, and explore. It’s unclear whether Roblox executives, or the children’s parents, even care that this might be an illusion.
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During a session inside an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog game, I found myself not launched into the exhilarating zooming, looping courses the franchise is famous for but standing in a starting area festooned with virtual billboards advertising ways to spend Robux. Before even getting to the part that could plausibly be described as a game, players must run past signs advertising a Character Sale, Mega Bundle, Legendary Spinner, Biker Shadow Bundle, Exclusive Nametag + Benefits, Chao Sale, Next World, Trading Hub, Daily Rewards, Chrome and Luminosity Golden Eggs, and new Friends and Trails. “Most Roblox game shops look a bit like Vegas stores,” Wilson told me. “They’re just very colorful and very bright and very liquid.” Some of these purchases, as is typical across Roblox, function more or less like kiddie roulette: As the name Legendary Spinner suggests, spending money here grants not even a desired virtual item or power-up but the chance to win a variety of different prizes.
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Kids can make money on Roblox, too. Critics accuse the company of profiting from child labor, and to some extent this is true: Part of Roblox’s corporate revenue is derived from its take of money earned by children who build and sell virtual worlds and items, though Roblox notes that most developers are over 18 years old. On the unofficial Discord servers and message boards that host Roblox’s informal labor market, children and adults hire one another freely, paying either dollars or Robux. A developer who wished to remain anonymous given recent headlines about Roblox told me he started working on the platform as a teenager and learned a lot of lessons the hard way: “When you’re a kid, you hear a little bit of money, like $5, and you’re like, Damn, that’s a lot of money, right?”
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Predators and corporate brands are drawn to Roblox for vastly different reasons, but there is one common draw: Kids are easy to influence, and they can easily be reached on the app. Fairplay, an organization that advocates against manipulative marketing practices aimed at children, has concluded that a commodified virtual world like Roblox owes its success in part to the decline of “third places,” the sociological term for spaces that are not our homes or the schools or offices we’re required to visit; parks, malls, and movie theaters are all examples of third places, many of them bulldozed by the advance of online commerce, social media, streaming, and other technologies that render the physical world obsolete.
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The future of Roblox, according to Baszucki, is to bring the world together — but to do what, exactly? Shop? Yes. Learn of the latest tasty entrées at Chipotle while dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog in a bulletproof vest? Absolutely. Roblox seems to be not just rebuilding the shopping-mall experience but expanding it into a self-contained paradise of software consumerism that could truly eat the world. Not content with shopping and gaming, Baszucki wants Roblox to be the place where you will live your life. In more ways than one, the children really might be our future.
Click over to read the whole thing.
And the New York Times recently reported on the online predators that target children on the platform (gift link).
It’s another reminder of how we need to be ultra careful with our children’s online lives.
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The Levels of the Game
Graham Duncan wrote a great article about the investing business, in which he lays out the levels of the game, and what separates the top investors.
Over the last decade, I’ve interviewed and assessed more than 5,000 investment managers. One of the most important things I’ve learned in that process is what separates the great investors from the rest. The great ones view investing as a game, and they know exactly what game they’re playing. It brings to mind an observation from the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah:
“In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”
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One way to relocate your locus of control is to frame investing (and even life more generally) as a game. This allows you to experience luck as luck, to separate the hand you drew from the playing of that hand. As David Milch, the creator of the HBO show Deadwood, put it, he realized late in life that “it’s the way you learn to play the cards you’ve been dealt, rather than the hand itself, that determines the worth of your participation in the game.”
He lays out five levels of investing:
1. Apprentice — learning the game
2. Expert — mastering the game you were taught
3. Professional — making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses
4. Master — changing the game you play as part of your own self-expression and operating at scale
5. Steward — becoming part of the playing field itself and mentoring the next generation
The most important part of this essay is his observations about what it takes to move beyond level three. This applies to many domains beyond investing.
The critical challenge for Level 3 investors is to find a way to be exposed to Level 4 investors. If their world consists of only Level 2 and 3, they may stay where they are for the rest of their careers.
An analogy from competitive swimming is useful here. The sociologist and coach Daniel Chambliss has observed that what he at first thought of as different levels of swimming are in fact different worlds:
Beyond an initial improvement in strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. …instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps:noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, are accomplished usually through a change in setting, e.g. working with a new coach, new friends, etc.who work at a higher level. What I have called “levels” are better described as “worlds” or “spheres.”
I’ve written a lot about what it takes to level up in life. At a certain point, you simply can’t simply do more and better of what you’ve been doing. What got you here won’t get you there. And it becomes impossible to see for yourself what you need to change. This is where mentorship is super-important, a topic I’ve written about before.
To be honest, since leaving the corporate world, I’ve lacked any real mentorship, which has undoubtedly hurt me. But thinking about this in terms of agency, finding mentorship is something we have to ensure we find for ourselves, not just relying on it happening.
There are more great thoughts in Duncan’s piece on the nature of top level investing, so it’s definitely worth reading.
Best of the Web
Tanner Greer: Bullets and Ballots - The Legacy of Charlie Kirk
Tomas Pueyo: Never Bet Against America
My poll this week is about Charlie Kirk
New Content and Media Mentions
New this week:
Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Adventure - Stories of past adventurers show what’s missing in today’s culture—and how to fix it
My podcast this week was with Caleb Morell on his new history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Cover image: Roblox headquarters by Mliu92/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
I meant to vote good change. Bad stuff won't happen.