Comment by darth_avocado
1 day ago
Investors are hilarious. What’s better: more investment in child safety measures so that a company remains a long term product that parents allow their children on, or no safety measures to increase profit so that parents stop letting their kids be on the platform, thereby killing long term viability of the product?
Quarterly thinking is the bane of the health of corporate America.
In this case, "child safety measures" includes not just "stopping child predators," but also "not letting kids use their parents' credit card to buy $500 of Robux" and "not letting underage users buy lootboxes, aka gambling".
It's completely understandable that the company, which profits off children, putting in measures making it harder to profit off children, would lower both its long and short-term valuations.
They're not really choosing to do that though. They are completely beholden to the out of sight conversation weekly with Apple that led to changes in how users can spend - especially funds that Apple gets less of a cut of, like Robux gift cards.
Another POV is that Roblox is overvalued and it's just a matter of time before the fragility of its business, which is being a time waster for kids, falls apart like everything else in that space.
So are you buying Roblox hand over fist? Didn't think so.
It's easy to talk big, it's hard to beat the supposedly stupid, myopic market.
Actually, myopic market has provided me plenty of opportunities and has served as a great wealth building force for myself.
But setting that aside, my perspective was mostly around capital allocation from investors. Yes on a personal level you can make more money by investing companies, hollowing them out for profit, and fleeing before the company fails, like a lot of PE does. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing for the company or for the investor themselves on a long enough time horizon.
Or perhaps the investors know that the child safety measures will actually harm the product because the harm to children is a significant part of their product/profit
Possible that there aren't measures that will actually achieve long-term safety while maintaining a highly popular platform?
Those profits, if they happen, will be delayed, so it means they aren't worth quite as much.
Markets are future discounting machines. A stock price does not reflect the current economic reality, but rather the present-day anticipation of how that company will perform in the future. Adding more friction to user experience and onboarding seems like a legitmate concern for retention and growth. The collective thinks this won't be good for future earnings, and I'd be curious to hear why you think otherwise.
It's not even quarterly thinking, it's castles in the sky speculation about what the market thinks the market will react to.