Why not Hard Drop?

What is Hard Drop?

There is no denying that harddrop is the largest tetris community by far. It is run entirely by Blink.

It is hard to deny what Blink has done in the past (running forums, wiki's and tournaments), but that does not mean he is immune to criticism.

General

Separations of identity

The main issue Hard Drop has currently no separation between "Blink" and "Hard Drop".

He has received criticism in the past about this, as seen in this reddit post. In his response, Blink states that he has no intention of pursuing personal fame, but instead intends to try and grow Hard Drop as a brand. On the surface this may seem pretty reasonable, since communities based around games are more successful than based communities around people, but it contradicts his actions.

99% of the streams on the official hard drop twitch channel are just Blink's personal stream, which then drowns out the rare official community tournaments that are on the channel. His YouTube isn't even called Hard Drop, and he basically just uploads vods from his twitch directly. In its current state, his twitter is actually fine, since there's not much personal "Blink" stuff on it. As for the discord, see below.

Other than the twitter, not much is being done to actually promote hard drop as a Tetris community/brand, and from the outside it just seems like there is a guy named "hard drop" who likes to play Tetris.

It's easy to be critical and provide no solutions so I will suggest some changes I would like to see:

  • Make a new twitch account for personal streams, only stream official Hard Drop events on the twitch.
  • Make a new youtube channel for high quality edited youtube videos. (Hire an editor or get a volunteer)
  • Discord suggestions see below.

Problems with the discord

Hard Drop is a safe space

While it may seem good to be "inclusive" and provide a safe space for people to hang out or what not, hard drop is supposed to be a Tetris community. The problem with "safe spaces" is that they become echo chambers, where nobody can be criticized or held accountable for what they do or say, unless it might hurt someone's feelings.

Bad advice

If you have been in the Hard Drop discord, you will know that there is a notorious channel called #questions.

In general there are not many good tetris resources. In other games you have tones of resources, like in league of legends, there's summoner school, imls coaching, etc. Tetris is quite the outlier in this regard, other than four.lol there are not really any great places to learn Tetris. The biggest tetris ""resource"" is hard drop, it has a large wiki with decades of info, and the hard drop discord with lots of members.

The real issue with those resources is that they are not "good sources of information" the person who runs both, does not care about quality. A popular argument is that hard drop wiki is supposed to be a wiki, a library of information, so whether something is good or bad, is out of the question. While this does seem to make sense, it actually contradicts Blink's attitude. A couple months ago a user named Garbo posted a "meme" setup called "DT+". Blink banned Garbo from the wiki because he had "bad intentions", since he knowingly posted a bad setup. If hard drop is a library for all setups, good or bad, why does it matter that the setup was bad? There are plenty of bad setups on the wiki, setups even worse than DT+ on the wiki. So clearly either all setups should be allowed to be documented there or there should be some specific rules on what the wiki should be.

As for the community, there is a #questions channel, where you can "receive answers from experienced Tetris players". The general quality of questions and answers is embarrassingly low, with most answers being not thought out, or incorrect information.

"Take everything with a grain of salt."

While its good to not take everything you read as 100% truth, it is also not an excuse to spread misinformation.

This, frankly, is a disgusting attitude to have especially in the Tetris community. Resources are so sparse, that it is hard for a beginner player to know what is right or wrong. As someone who chooses to answer a question, you have the responsibility to provide correct information. Who do you blame when test scores are low? The students or the teachers? This attitude is such a regressive mindset, it makes me sick to even think about.

Be the change you want to see.

Teaching and helping others is something I am passionate about. For those of you who did not know me, I have probably helped the most people in #questions out of anyone on the server. If you take the number of messages I have in #questions and compare it to the sum of the next most active people, I probably still have more. How can you make change when there are people actively working against you? The problem is blink cares more about encouraging people to talk rather than having accurate information. Blink would rather have quantity over quality.

HD FAQ

While I was working on this FAQ, there was a shit storm in hard drop #questions about chat quality. My FAQ was posted, but I ended up taking it down, since I knew that blink would use it as an excuse to pretend he "fixed" the issue. The root cause of the issues with hard drop is blinks attitude. The FAQ will not fix that, it only helps alleviate some of the problems of repeated questions.

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