Baszuki appeared visibly frustrated during the Hard Fork podcast when hosts kept asking about the company’s new age verification tools. The executive reportedly struggled to understand why the public is fixated on “protection” when the platform offers such high-fidelity virtual experiences.

“We built a world where a nine-year-old can run a pizza parlor with zero overhead costs, and the media only wants to talk about who is talking to that nine-year-old,” said Brad Halloway, Roblox’s Vice President of Ignoring Problems. “It is a classic case of customers not knowing what they want. Parents say they want ‘safety,’ but what they really need is a quiet hour while their kid manages a virtual theme park.”

The company insisted that implementing strict age checks creates “unnecessary hassle” for the millions of users who simply want to interact without defining who they actually are. Executives argued that “stranger danger” is an old-fashioned idea that hurts user growth charts.

“If we focus too much on safety, we lose the magic of serendipitous encounters with anonymous users,” said Sarah Jenkins, Director of Unsupervised Growth. “We are disrupting the concept of parenting by automating it, but people keep asking for the manual features back.”

At publishing time, Roblox announced a new compromise feature where parents can pay a monthly fee to disable the “creepy stranger” setting.

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