Small decisions that end up causing something huge in the end. I think they are the same.
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The snowball effect is essentially a feedback loop. Think of a microphone next to a speaker. The smallest sound sets off the speaker, which sets off the microphone which transmits the sound to the speaker, only this time it’s twice as loud. The speaker plays it, the microphone picks it up again and on it goes.
It’s something that starts off small and picks up momentum very fast because of a self-reinforcing loop. Like a snowball running down a snowy hill.
The domino effect refers to any single event that sets off a chain of events. Think of a banking collapse. If a single bank defaults on its payments, the next bank finds itself in serious trouble because all of its loans are now worth nothing, which makes it default as well. The chain keeps going on, until the entire banking system collapses.
The phenomenon itself did not increase in magnitude, but the fact that everything is tightly linked means the second one part fails, everything falls flat. Like a chain of dominoes.
The butterfly effect refers to how a very small event can cause cataclysmic, sometimes completely unrelated consequences. It gets its name from chaos theory and the hypothesis that a single butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tornado to eventually form on the other side of the planet. Many mathematical systems exhibit this property: the simplest change in the initial conditions causes the most jarring difference in the end result.
They’re not the same concept. They make look like so at the outset, but they highlight different properties of what essentially is a chain of events.
*(Edit: You could even argue that the butterfly effect is essentially a domino chain that is amplified like a snowball, but the main point of the butterfly effect is to highlight the immense magnitudes by which the end result can vary compared to changes in the initial effect that set off the events.)*
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