Just to also piggy back, I also agree this seems to be very inappropriate and really unprofessional, how is this even inappropriate content.
This is not in anyway inappropriate nor should be deemed inappropriate, they should really fix their moderation.
I was warned simply for telling a story of why I left and returned to Roblox.
If I had to guess, it’s probably the fact you mentioned “furry fandom”. Also, if I were you and you were me, I’d refrain from these giant stories of why you left and came back. When you get older, you’ll regret it. Take it from someone who has done something similar, is now older and regrets it.
Majority of moderation on this platform is automated. Hiring more moderation staff won’t fix the issue that comes with managing scale. It’s a pretty big technical issue that a lot of companies face. This basically sums it up though.
Roblox has 1500-2000+ human moderators employed FYI. This statement is not accurate.
I feel like this number is exaggerated. They may have a number of moderators but, that specific range doesn’t make any sense considering the amount of mistakes in moderation. Even if it’s outsourced (which it is), that seems unquestionably high.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1315098/000119312520298230/d87104ds1.htm
As of September 30, 2020, we have a dedicated team and over 1,700 trust & safety agents protecting our users by focusing on detecting inappropriate content 24/7 through a combination of machine scanning and human moderation. We take swift action to address any content or developer or creator that violates our terms of use once detected. We have a Safety Advisory Board, made up of global industry experts that advise on the best practices to protect our community.
It’s likely 2000+ by now. Some recent news articles appear to mention 2300.
3 years since this was made, and the debate is still on. Roblox needs to improve moderation, especially now that they are public. What if someone important quits one day because of the moderation? Thousands of players can be lost. I once took a month break from Roblox because of the stupidity of it. You get warns on decals without reason, they don’t listen to reports, and it seems like moderation is falling apart. I hope Roblox improves on this before there is truly a disaster.
Can’t argue with that. Didn’t actually know that document listed that.
Can we please for the love of our sanity get an update on this?!
It seems to me that Moderation is devolving by the minute, this is absolutely insane and unacceptable.
Did that user appeal? I’m not sure why one user experience is particularly valuable; moderation staff make mistakes when they’re responsible for tens of thousands of assets every day.
If they appealed and that appeal got rejected, then obviously that would be room for concern - but mistakes are made, and as long as Roblox recognise that and retroactively correct it then there shouldn’t be any issue.
Yes, Koneko mentioned that the user’s ban was reverted. (From the video)
And no this kind of mistake is unacceptable for a company that’s worth more than 1 Billion USD, thriving while devs struggle to survive from Moderator action.
I don’t think you understand how severe this issue is, nor experienced it by your own hands.
It is unlikely that Roblox support will do anything helpful, you can read up on a magnitude of sad stories related to that. (or watch Koneko, he covers these topics on his channel)
While real offenders get away with extremely inappropriate content, legit users who are trying to make a living are being road blocked by the stupidity of someone else and that is unacceptable. If it’s not their fault they shouldn’t be responsible for it, but yet they are and that is sad.
I have experienced incorrect moderation actions on my account, including a 7 day ban - after appeal, all of them were removed from my account.
Saying “Roblox should not make mistakes”, or that because they have a certain revenue or userbase size is not a realistic approach to addressing or bringing up problems. If you take X million users, with Y thousand moderators who have to review K thousand assets every day there will undoubtedly be misclicks, incorrect assumptions, confusion or edging on the side of caution which will lead to incorrect actions being made.
I’d also like to see the (non anecdotal) evidence that you have implying that more false positive moderations are made than true positive moderation actions - otherwise we’re constructing a strawman argument about Roblox’s moderation effectiveness.
If you are Roblox, you can’t have a moderation service which is cost effective, fast, and accurate all at the same time. They’re at total odds to each other. Even if you assume that a well trained moderator makes 1 mistake per day, having reviewed 5,000 assets in that day that is still going to affect someone who will shout loudly about how they were unfairly moderated - you don’t see the other 4,999 people shouting as loudly about how they not moderated.
Also, I don’t understand how this user has struggled to survive from a Moderator action? The appeals process worked, he got the ban undone and we have no idea if that would’ve been done whether he made a YouTube video or not. This is generally true for moderation actions; in the worst case, a developer who has committed a DevEx-bannable offence (i.e. scamming, racism, or something warranting a long ban) will only be banned from DevEx until the end of the year, if the action is not appealed.
Bottom line is that these videos rake in lots of money and views because they’re great stories; but that is all they are - stories. They’re not representative of the whole picture and I don’t think they proport to be that either.
Yeah but banning a developer with a 100k+ visit game should probably require two humans to look at whatever they uploaded and this would probably fix 99% of the problems.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Apart from developers I would also do it for any account with significant activity (hours played in-game, cc purchases, strong identity via twitter/facebook/youtube/cell, etc), moderation queue depth permitting.
I’m not sure if having two independently operating moderators would fully solve these issues - if we’re going to treat developers differently (which I am not against, since the stakes are a lot higher for people who base their livelihood on this platform) we should actually give them a specific final step moderation team who can hand out punishments that keep in mind how damaging these actions could be on income.
One issue I see is the hard rules about DevEx with moderation; your account must be in “good standing” which typically means receiving any ban will exempt you from eligibility for a year. Perhaps the better approach would be for the DevEx team to review these on a case-by-case basis to figure out if the moderation action should exempt a user?
Agreed on the principle though. Roblox should do better for top devs here.
I’ve personally had some some questionable moderation actions which have luckily been sorted out. I just not a fan of taking these individual cases, right or wrong as indicative of the entire system. The user in question isn’t a giant dev, and in any of these queue systems eventually someone will screw up (the thing that matters is that it is fixed later).
There’s huge sampling bias.
I’m sure top devs are reported 100s of times a day, so even if moderation is 99.99% accurate there are going to be mistakes. 2 people cuts the error to 1/.9999^2, which is basically zero.
And before someone like Cindering gets banned for anything, someone from devrel should email/call him directly to see what the deal is. He shouldn’t login to Roblox and see this. It’s terrible.
The fact that banning is the only tool is also not great. A game with moderated assets could just be set to 13+/18+ depending on how sus it is while the dev sorts it out.
my 2c
I never understood why simple things can lead to bans. It would be much easier for Roblox just to content delete the content and send the developer a message. I’m sure they have metrics to determine top developers and just ordinary players uploading content.
Even deleting the content is annoying.
As a developer in the past I’ve had issues with assets not loading because they’ve been deleted. As far as I know, there is no easy way for me to get a list of my recently moderated assets.
So deletion should be a last resort and should only happen for popular assets (or trusted users) if multiple moderators concur.
I am not talking about obviously bad assets uploaded by accounts with no history. I’m mostly talking about devs and users with strong identities.
I know how much of a hassle it would be to have a separate moderation queue for top developers moderated content but that would probably be the best course of action in the future for moderating top developers.
I agree with deletion as a last resort, but unless there is a separate moderation process for strong identities, it would at least be a better option than the possibility of a 1 day, 3 day or even 7 day ban for something as simple as text moderation or images that the auto mod can’t recognize.
I know that since this incident Roblox have implemented strategies to prevent bans from being handed out to top developers; i.e. that DevRel get notified before the fact so they can handle it with the dev, and if appropriate dispute it on their behalf.
Honestly, top games and developer profiles shouldn’t even be able to be reported in this way - you’d hope that Roblox would be actively monitoring their profiles and the front page for bad behaviour anyway.
