Dylan's half-formed thoughts and musings
Last week Hindenburg Research announced their short position in Roblox. This was ostensibly based on claims of usage inflation with a mostly ad hominem attack on their child safety policies thrown in for good measure. In general, I quite like what Hindenburg does in the world but I was disappointed in the weakness of this report 1 , a view seemingly shared by the market (Roblox’s share price has since mostly recovered). I’m not going to write about the report itself because I don’t really have much to add beyond what Joost has already written.
I did however, want to talk about the challenges of building digital consumer services which support kids. There is a tendency for people to criticise this area with a simplicity afforded to those who have not had to actually tackle some of these problems. In fact, even the word ‘problem’ is a misnomer: in the kids’ space you are not really solving anything, you are choosing points on a continuum between four fundamental sets of design trade-offs.
Although these trade-offs are not in any order, I think this one is logically first. The more you deprecate features for kids to try and deliver a completely safe experience (e.g. social), the more they will ignore the ‘kids’ option and just go straight to an adult version if they can. Kids do not care about your app store labels.
