With the recent actions taken by twitter (most likely their undeveloped AI) on our community members on Roblox, I believe that the time has come for Roblox to create and establish their own social media platform for developers to communicate with their audience. This thread is in response to the many discussion threads created on this forum, as listed.
I am requesting Roblox to establish their own social media platform, such as social.roblox.com. This will allow developers to interact with their audience and reduce the risk of being moderated unfairly. Twitter has been a great platform for developers to interact with players and other developers (outside of DevForum), but with the recent crisis, this may not be the best solution. Members of the community have been removed from twitter over tweets that weren’t controversial, and have been denied their appeals as well. A great example of this is CloneTrooper1019 with this tweet.
Other examples of members being suspended/compromised from twitter include, but not limited to, Lilly_S, a member of the Developer Relations, Younite, hoosierdaddy22, THEM Magaines, and others.
There are some user suggestions I’ve collected and put together here.
Deleting Posts.
“Hiding” Specific Posts from other users.
Replying to a post. Replies show when the original post is clicked.
Reposts.
You receive posts in your feed from people you follow and groups you’re in.
Ability to link social media with ROBLOX so anything you post there goes to those places.
Inline images.
Inline styling.
Clickable hashtags to categorize posts
Search posts. All posts. Not just the ones in the past 24 hours. Not just the latest 30.
Don’t update a player’s feed based on when the player is signed in.
Privatizing Posts
Suggestions by [constantly updated]: ChipioIndustries , GetEnveloped
An addition to the moderation team dedicated to the social side.
Filtering? (pls, no, pls, someone find me a solution to this)
Posts being COPPA compliant (from 1waffle1)
Edit: After reading the discussion, this would likely not be a suitable option for Roblox, as it will be extremely difficult for the content to be COPPA compliant, and there’s just too many issues overall.
The issue with this is that for me, and probably other developers, Twitter is about more than just Roblox. I want to be able to take my Twitter with connections and a fan base beyond Roblox, into my future career.
Also, by the time something like this would be made and implemented this whole fiasco will have blown over and Twitter will be the best option.
However, we could use a revamp of the following and feed systems on Roblox so we don’t have to rely to heavily on Twitter and Discord to connect with audiences.
This would be a huge step in establishing ROBLOX not as just a game, but as a platform for users to communicate with one another. I definitely support this.
You make a decent point. Although a social system integrated into ROBLOX would allow for easy access to players, it also alienates those who do not typically participate in ROBLOX. I think a system like this would be meant to be used in junction with other sites like Twitter and Facebook, much like people do now, and not necessarily as a sole point of information.
I can see your point. Having a twitter is not a problem alongside the roblox social platform, it’s just that twitter can sometimes get out of control. However, with a social platform on Roblox, we can have proper moderation, and a proper way to connect with the audience on Roblox itself. There could be many use-cases, and what if you used twitter for personalized content and social.roblox for professional content?
You can take this idea on a whole different level, it just depends on what you want to do. As for me, I’d love to use both twitter and social.roblox
I’m not asking for this feature request ONLY because of their moderation. Personally, I feel that there would be a better interaction with players and more options to connect with games and whatnot. But yes, twitter moderation is a problem.
The feed system is mainly for updates and quotes regarding games and players or whatever. It doesn’t provide proper interaction between developers and players.
Also, this would be a great suggestion that @ChipioIndustries brought up for the feed system:
Considering that this would be social media, an age restriction would be important. Obviously, under 13 accounts won’t have access.
There is the problem with filtering, and I have an idea for a solution:
Filtering is done client-side (or in this case, for the individual user, not as a general broadcast).
You can enable/disable filtering and maybe remove certain contexts from the filter (e.g. personal details).
This of course would come with a warning.
I also believe a general segmentation of content could be in place - users could mark their posts either as mature or … well… immature (which would be the default option).
The latter could be available to < 13s.
I still think there’s a ton of ways this could go wrong tho lol
Plus it’s just another tab I will have to keep pinned and an eye on in my all ready clogged browser.
While this may be good, I think we should stay with an external service.
People don’t necessarily have to abandon Twitter. I’m not abandoning Twitter anytime soon, either. This is about having an alternative, integrated platform to communicate with users and players.
Also, it’s not necessarily a “moderation hiccup.” The problem is that any disgruntled user has the ability to take down a twitter account they disagree with, permanently in some cases. This problem has happened before and will continue to happen, and may even get worse as more people discover the loophole.
What if it was made where not everyone gets to use the system?
I don’t have an idea at the moment how a whitelist system would work for the social media platform.
I understand how annoying it is to have someone going around taking down Twitter accounts for ridiculous reasons, but I’m pretty sure abandoning Twitter isn’t the solution here.
This would never work if ROBLOX wants to stay a child friendly site for all ages. They have to have it filtered to be COPPA compliant, even if it’s for certain users. Look at 13+ users on the site already.
Why not just official Change logs and game/group based “discussions” like on steam? I see no need to create an entire social media platform exclusively for this dev-user communication (or even for general discussion. you have the forums, walls, and not to mention the many other more reliable means of communication like discord). I agree that better tools for this communication (like said above, change logs and “discussions”) should be implemented, but I see absolutely no need for ROBLOX to make their own social media platform.
As posted in the edit on the thread, this request doesn’t seem reasonable for Roblox to do as it will be extremely difficult for it to be COPPA compliant, therefore I am requesting a thread lock please.
