Tag Archives: Social Media

Disenchanted with Dominions 6

I’ve posted a lot about Dominions 6 on this blog, but I’ve become disenchanted with it since I last posted. Some of this may be because I’ve been busier, other stuff however I’d like to blog about. I don’t have much time (like I said, I’ve been busy), but here’s a quick overview of why I fell out of favor with it. Note, I do hope to rejoin Dominions 6 some time soon, but for the first time this year I’m not playing any games of it.

First, the community is a mess. I think Discord is the worst place possible to have a video game community, but I haven’t been able to find games anywhere but Discord. Regardless, all the worst parts of a community are here. In particular, long-time players get “know-everything” syndrome, somewhat like the infamous Stack Overflow community.

Now, Dominions is a complicated game. I’d go so far as to say that no one understands the game well enough to be an expert in every situation. But long-time players will act like they know everything, and that their tactics are always the best and should never be questioned. So when you, as a new player, come for advice, the conversation goes like this:

  • Newbie: “I want to do X, what’s the best way to do it?”
  • Veteran: “No one does X, why would you ever do that? Do Y instead.”
  • Newbie: “I can’t do Y, and anyway I don’t want to. What about X”
  • Other Vet: “It isn’t even possible to do X lol, why are you trying, just do Z”
  • Newbie: “I actually just did X, but I want to do it better next time, that’s why I’m coming here for advice”
  • Vet: “So to do Y, first you gotta do A, then you gotta do B, here I posted a video about it with terrible audio on my channel”

Veterans don’t want to actually help new players, they want to hear themselves talk, so they just ignore questions and give the answers they always wanted to give. Many veterans are also less knowledgeable than they think they are, and will confidently give incorrect information because they think they already know everything and have no reason to check. Meanwhile a newbie who *is* checking their information (because they don’t think they know everything yet) will be harangued and insulted if they dare question a veteran, because a veteran is a long-time community member and thus the community will declare them “right” by default.

Another problem is that the community has a bad habit of just not answering questions at all. Dominions has a LOT of spells and units and abilities. Many of those are useless, some are quite useful. Which are which?

Well if someone asked me, “is foul vapors useful?” I’d point them to my blog post where I discussed just that in many paragraphs. My post wasn’t fully comprehensive, but I feel I gave a broad overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the spell, and noted when it could be used and when maybe it shouldn’t be.

If a newbie asks “is foul vapors useful?” in Discord, the number 1 answer will be “it depends,” followed by a veteran shutting down the conversation and saying the newbie is asking dumb questions. In truth, it DOES depend, because there are some situations (as I outlined in my post!) where it isn’t as useful. But “it depends” is a conversation-ending answer to LITERALLY ANY QUESTION, and gives no useful information whatsoever.

Will the sun rise tomorrow? Honestly, *IT DEPENDS*, because there’s a non-zero chance for a micro-black hole to zip through the solar system kicking out planet out and into deep space. But that isn’t a useful answer to someone who is honestly trying to get information, in 99.999999999% of cases, the useful answer is “yes,” not “it depends.”

Same with “is foul vapors useful?” A useful answer is to give an overview of its strengths and weaknesses, and summarize with “in most cases, given these tactics, yes it is.” Shutting down the conversation with a non-answer only happens (I think) because discord is an instant-message-based form of communication, instead of thread-based like a normal forum. People see a question in their feed and treat it like a text message, they HAVE to answer it. But they don’t have a real answer and they don’t care about this person, so they shut down the conversation with “it depends” instead of giving an actual answer or just ignoring it and letting someone who actually cares answer the question.

Finally, Discord is a terrible way to form a community because it isn’t searchable for answers. The Discord search function is basically useless and Discord isn’t indexed on google. This means that a newbie looking for advice can’t go through the decades worth of accumulated knowledge from the community, they have no choice but to brave the discord wastes and have all the terrible conversations I outlined above. There’s a Dominions wiki, but it’s largely abandoned and mostly consists of information from Dominions 5 (which despite being very well documented has largely been abandoned by the community now that Dominions 6 is out).

What all this means is this:
I’m OK at Dominions, but I wanted to get better. However every attempt to learn more was an exercise in frustration. Stack-overflow-esque veterans telling you that you shouldn’t do what you want to do, giving correct advice, and shutting down the conversation when genuine questions were asked. Additionally the community is too small and fragmented to find any information *except* on Discord. For all these reasons, I sort of peaked in my abilities in the game and decided to stop trying. I don’t have the time to test everything I want to know myself, and I don’t have the patience to deep with the exceptionally unhelpful community. So I stopped.

I hope I’ll get the patience to start again.

Social Media is a click-farm, it shows you only what you are most likely to click

Yet again the topic is raised that social media is harming our youth. Just as Seneca of Rome once complained that reading too many books was corrupting the youth, so too do we moderns complain about our own technology. But now it comes with a twist: social media has been anthropomorphized into a sentient being, force-feeding out children propaganda to turn their brains to mush and their muscles to puddy.

Let’s get one thing straight: social media gets money through clicks. Without clicks, advertisers won’t advertise, because they know that users aren’t engaged enough to read the ads. And the social media can’t force you to click, the user has to do that themselves.

So what do users click on? Overwhelmingly it’s exactly what they claim to hate and avoid. This is a classic case of revealed preferences, people like to claim that they are moral and high-minded, that they spend their time on science and philosophy. Overwhelmingly they prefer to spend their time on video games, celebrities, and politics. So if social media is feeding you mindless garbage, it is because you have revealed through your click habits that you prefer to eat trash.

When you first log in to any social media website, it has no idea what you like. By default, it will start sending you a very random and scattershot selection of everything it has on offer. But very quickly, you will start clicking on the things that interest you, and ignoring the things that don’t. And so social media has learned that the vast majority of us won’t click on a science post if our life depended on it, we’d rather read about Taylor Swift instead.

Next time a politician complains that their social media feed is nothing but trash, and that they have legislation to regulate social media more, tell them about revealed preferences. That politician is advertising to the world that they themselves are a trash human being.