Improving user experience by reducing exposure of low quality content

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Creators,

Today, we’d like to share an update on how we are improving user experience by reducing exposure of low quality content. Building a good experience on Roblox is a labor of love, and we want to make sure experiences that offer unique value to the community don’t have their discoverability impacted by low quality content.

Three areas we are improving upon today

  1. Ensuring your creative work shines: Experiences with thumbnails, title, description or placefiles that closely resemble existing experiences on Roblox are no longer prioritized for recommendations (across Home, Charts) and are now less visible in search results. This doesn’t mean creators can’t make experiences in the same trend as existing content; they can, as long as they add differentiated value with unique content and accurately represent their uniqueness in the title, images, description, and placefiles. This ensures users find the unique and diverse content they are looking for.

  2. Safeguarding users from implied Robux giveaways: Experiences that imply any type of monetary rewards, such as free Robux are now less visible.

  3. Building user trust in metadata: When the metadata and content are highly mismatched, that content will not be recommended to users across Home and Charts. It will also be less visible in search. The title, thumbnail, genre, description, and age guidelines need to accurately reflect the actual experience. This will help users make informed decisions about the content they interact with.

How to increase your reach

Discoverability is within your reach if you build a great experience that users enjoy and put these best practices into action.

  • Be accurate. Avoid using irrelevant keywords to ensure your content is discoverable. Follow our metadata best practices.

  • Publish content with unique metadata. Focus on using original imagery and naming that you or your teammates created to help your experience stand out. Avoid publishing content with repetitive titles and images that have been previously published by another creator. To ensure your thumbnails are effective, test them with thumbnail personalization.

  • Stick to the same network of groups and accounts when publishing sequels and spin-offs to your existing experience. This way, our systems know that it is connected to you, and your sequel/spin-off can continue to enjoy discoverability.

  • Add your own spin to existing trends in the title, images, description, and in-experience content when you hop on trends. Your unique updates let us know that you’ve added value that is differentiated from other experiences following that trend.

Experiences that don’t follow the above best practices will not rank high in search and will not be eligible for homepage recommendations. You will see a message on your creator dashboard if we detect your experience has a quality issue, and you will find detailed best practices in Creator Hub to improve your reach.

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Discoverability is dynamic, and our systems reclassify experiences with each update. Therefore, experiences always have the opportunity to improve their reach. Our detection system is continuously monitored and tested to ensure we can maintain the quality of experiences our users are looking for.

What’s next

Our commitment is to be transparent with you, and we will continue adding more best practice suggestions personalized to your experience to help you improve your reach. You will also be able to provide feedback if you disagree with our assessment on quality.

As stated in our Discovery vision this year, we are guided by our mission to connect users to the best creations and community for them — and to match creations with the most relevant audience. This is an area of continued investment for us and we’re always open to feedback to address more areas like this.

Thanks,
Roblox team

FAQs

Thank you for your questions. Below we’ve answered some of the most common ones:

How does Roblox identify low quality experiences that should have reduced visibility?

  • We prioritize multiple objective measures via models and human reviews and reduce the visibility of experiences that don’t adhere to the outlined best practices. This approach helps ensure a level playing field where high-quality content isn’t competing with noise.

    It is worth noting that if we’re looking at, for example, 10 experiences that appear indistinguishable, we’re not prioritizing discoverability based on which experience was first created. Rather we’re making sure we highlight the experience that first added the unique metadata and/or placefile.

    If you see a message on your creator dashboard you can always change your discoverability status by following our best practices. Finally, if you encounter any issues, please submit a bug report. We’re continually improving our system and value your feedback to make it better.

How do I know if my thumbnail or title or gameplay is too similar and will face reduced discoverability as a result?

  • A handy rule of thumb is to consider this from a user’s perspective: if you, as a user, search for an experience and are inundated with multiple options that have the same visuals and/or titles, making them virtually indistinguishable, it’s neither a good experience for you nor fair to the creator who originally built a quality experience. So, you can expect that experiences like that will have reduced discoverability.

    As we’ve shared above, rely on your creator dashboard to understand the visibility of your experience.

What if I publish a sequel or derivative work to my first experience?

  • That’s fine. Our systems recognize that you were the creator of the previous experience and therefore will not negatively impact your discoverability.

Can we reuse our own thumbnails?

  • Yes, you can switch back and forth between old/new icons/thumbnails within your experience or experiences from the same network of groups and accounts. Your discoverability will not be impacted negatively.

If my experience has a generic name (e.g.Obby, Firefighter), will I be impacted?

  • Discoverability of your experience will not be impacted as long as your name and other metadata accurately reflects the experience.

What if I see content that violates Community Standards?

  • We encourage users to submit abuse reports when they find content that violates the Community Standards.
234 Likes
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

This is pretty nice, This will make sure that users will see more original content rather than the same thing over and over again

27 Likes
#4

Experiences with thumbnails, title, description or placefiles that closely resemble existing experiences on Roblox

How is “existing” qualified? If someone uploads a clone of my game onto an older existing place and now has a much earlier “Created” timestamp – What happens?

66 Likes
#5

hoooray!!! finally my showcase can get exposure!!!

7 Likes
#6

I assume they would use the most recent updated date rather than creation date, but I’m not sure

9 Likes
#7

I do appreciate the spirit in which this is being given, however, this only deepens my doubts of getting a new game discovered on Roblox. My main concern being who decides whether my game is unique enough compared to existing games. Is it Roblox moderation? AI? Need I even say more?

Besides, this only sounds like it serves to create monopolies on trends. Look at FPS games for example, I can give you several popular experiences right now that all have nearly identical game icons (see below). They do this because it’s proven to be effective (thank you thumbnail personalization), but maybe now Roblox will just pick their favorite one, or what they consider to be the “original” and then remove everybody else from the algorithm? This would destroy the other creators.

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I’d agree that we need a system to weed out bad actors and clear copies of games that flood the ecosystem, but to potentially punish existing good games just to remove a clone with 0 players (realizing that I’m assuming some things here) is a means that does not justify the end. I’m very wary of this update suffocating new and undiscovered creators because they’ve done something subjectively similar to an existing game.

79 Likes
#8

If one place uses React and another place uses React but everything else is different, would this affect the search results as well?

3 Likes
#9

Is there any similar efforts to follow these same goals for the avatar marketplace?

11 Likes
#10

Its already clear that automated detection of bad content does not work from the chat filter alone, constantly filtering genuine messages while completely allowing profane slurs and derogatory language with barely any effort to bypass.

While I do think that this is a good idea in principle, I think it quickly can be abused by bad actors, and also may harm genuine small creators trying to raise the bar of quality in an existing genre.

My biggest concern is that this is just making developers work harder to avoid yet another automated algorithm debuff to SEO their game. Small developers do not need this hassle, and I really hope that this is executed properly, including a way for developers to report false exposure reduction and for a human to intervene.

17 Likes
#11

I understand the intentions, but I think that this can hurt smaller creators if this isn’t lenient enough. I have plenty of friends who have games that are in a similar niche. How will it affect them? There is too much of a grey area with this update.

I am glad that Roblox is trying to tackle games that are of lower-quality like Robux giveaway scams and such, but I don’t think that quality should be the main issue at hand. I’d say moreso games that are of poor-quality in the sense of “freaky” or “sus” games as well as scams. The smaller developer should not be punished for having a game that is similar to another

If this is strictly in terms of extremely low like-to-dislike ratios, then this would make more sense. Uniqueness is a subjective :confused:

13 Likes
#12

I can already see people commenting concerned about what this means for following trends. I think that the good this change brings outweighs that and we should be able to adapt. That said, my impression is that this is more about combating clones and bait-and-switch games. God I miss unique button tycoons the main allure for me was getting to unlock a unique build piece by piece but now it’s all repainted tycoon kits with nothing new to offer (and worse, ones that actually involve any base-building at all are drowned out by merge tower tycoons which I think really need to be called something different bc. how is this still the same genre)…I’m genuinely hoping this leads to all those hidden gems in the tycoon genre finally being exposed

Truth be told, as a player, if I’m already enjoying one game, the only reason I’d click one with a similar icon is by accident, and I’m actually more likely to close it to go back to the one that I prefer, so…I think icon trends are a fair sacrifice. Though again I think this is mostly targeting clones and bait-and-switch, which you’d see using icons a lot more similar than those examples.

6 Likes
#13

Most of this sounds like a good idea in theory, but it would be horrible if we were somehow accidentally triggering lower discovery without knowing (eg having a similar icon to another game, but both games are different). Will there be anything to tell us if our games are getting less exposure from the impacts of this change?

edit: I missed a whole section of the post my bad, but a new question is will it tell us specifically what caused reduced exposure in the event that it happens?

12 Likes
#14

Hope this answers your question!

4 Likes
#15

What about thumbnails for experiences made by the same artist that look similar but are unique for their game. A lot of games have similar thumbnails as that’s what’s popular and gets the best play through rate.

20 Likes
#16

How will this affect experiences with a testing place where they upload their icons and thumbnails first? Or experiences that were moved? Will the “First” be considered the original or the more popular one?

7 Likes
#17

Oh lol my bad I missed that somehow on mobile. Hopefully it’ll be able to tell us exactly why tho, and not just say that it’s happening

5 Likes
#18

IMG_2513
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That says robux giveaway, good job Roblox
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Better photo

4 Likes
#19

Interesting hearing this considering this happened yesterday:

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Overall, though, these algo changes seem helpful and much less ambiguous than previous ones :+1:

7 Likes
#20

No longer will I have the thought in the back of the mind thinking “it would be so much easier to just pump out low quality content”. This is a really good change for the platform, and lines up with aging it up as has been talked about in the past. Any plans for similar efforts in the marketplace? The amount of low quality and copyrighted UGC is insane, feels as if there is very little moderation whatsoever.

6 Likes