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FlippantBuoyancy OP t1_je3x2j4 wrote

Big Brother Canada is a reality show wherein 16 contestents inhabit a house that is isolated from the outside world. Up through season 10, viewers could continously monitor the contestents via so-called "live feeds". However, the producers decided to remove the live feeds for the current season. The live feeds were replaced with daily curated content known as "digital dailies".

The plot above shows r/bigbrother subreddit engagement in terms of total posts per day. The first three weeks of the previous season (BBCAN10) are compared to the current season (BBCAN11). The four threads that correspond to live feeds (morning feeds, afternoon feeds, evening feeds, and LNC feeds) no longer exist in the current season (BBCAN11). They have been replaced by a single daily subreddit thread: digital dailies. Both seasons share three threads related to episodic content: the episode thread, the spoiler thread, and the post episode thread.

The plot was constructed in OriginPro. Data was pulled using the {social}^grep API.

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AntoniaFauci t1_je5nd21 wrote

Interesting.

Although your headline conclusion may not align with the reality of the situation. Sure, it’s one conclusion that could fit. But others fit too, and fit better with the qualitative parts of the situation.

For example, right before the season started, one moderator arbitrarily decided to not allow critique of the show’s last minute decision to kill off viewer threads.

They went heavy handed, hiding and censoring posts and attacking users. I was falsely accused of being a shill from another social media source, then threatened and sanctioned.

The messages from the angry mod were... disturbing.

Whether the mod liked my opinion or not, my posts got heavy engagement. But with them actively attacking and threatening me, it was an easy decision to not bother helping support them with interesting content contributions. It would be interesting to see data on what other content contributors they’ve driven off.

The mod became an unofficial propaganda organ for the show’s production, suppressing critique while activively promoting the shift to “digital dailies”, a minimal and contrived substitute.

I watched as any posts contrary to the mods militant stance would pop and vanish shortly after. Users would disappear.

So your hypothesis that the show killed off your subreddit might be a little off. The subreddit itself may have a big hand in killing off its own engagement by going to war on their own user community.

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FlippantBuoyancy OP t1_je5w9xq wrote

Interesting, I had some similar experiences during the first week of the season. And quite a few conversations with the mods.

Ultimately, I suspect there is an element of both things at play: (1) sedated viewership because of no feeds and (2) the subreddit self-sabotaging. A good handle on this might be just comparing the episode threads (gold bars) between BBCAN10 and BBCAN11. Posts in the episode threads shouldn't be getting censored to any significant degree. Yet the comments for BBCAN11 still lag BBCAN10 by a large amount.

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AntoniaFauci t1_je5y7gc wrote

For a data analysis, compare the weeks before the moderator went to war on the users versus after. I suspect you’ll see a marked inflection point when they began suppressing comments and pushing away the users who had been driving engagement.

Unfortunately your API probably can’t access data for threads and comments they suppressed.

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FlippantBuoyancy OP t1_je5znf7 wrote

>Unfortanately your API probably can’t access data for threads and comments they suppressed.

You're correct, unfortunately.

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