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 They have been replaced by a single daily subreddit thread: digital dailies.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.

I got there eventually, but...this was hard to read at first. Maybe I'm dumb.

Also, yeah, something seems to have seriously murdered the subreddit.

I wonder how this corresponds to tv viewership. Has it also declined? Do you know the reason the live feed was killed? I bet the show runner would be interested in this data or should be at least. Does anyone from the show openly engage on the BigBrother sub?

Also, nice work. Sure that took a lot of time.

I think I’d pull the BB10 and BB11 bars apart—with the way they’re nestled, the colours, and the key having that vertical line, it took me a minute to figure out that it was overlaid sets of 15 days.

It is a bleak picture once it all clicks, though!

I’m pretty sure the /r/Bigbrother main mod was like, unhinged or something. Wonder if the sub just Became stepping on eggshells to engage in.

Not sure I understand this. I see three separate downward trends. And are the BBCAN11 bars on the right or are they the small ones just next to each larger bar?

Now that I'm on my cell, I realize it's rather hard to see the hashing on the BBCAN11 bars. But yes, your understanding is correct: each day has a smaller BBCAN11 bar directly to the right of the BBCAN10 bar.

So days 1 and 2 are really the only days where engagement was even remotely similar.

My bad. It was much more obvious on my computer. Now that I'm on a cell, it's apparent that the hashing on the BBCAN11 bars is rather hard to see.

You’ve understated it. Engagement was normal until a couple weeks before the season when the show producers revealed they were killing off the feeds, a fundamental part of premise.

Then engagement actually spiked, as followers decried this seemingly self-limiting choice. And the user protests were sensible, given that this same community of social media engagement had helped rescue the show from cancelation a couple times before.

But an odd thing happened a couple days before show began. An unhinged mod decided nobody could question the feeds issue. Except there was no rule change or discussion. They just started hiding and deleting posts, or banning users, as previously mention without an actual published rule.

I very civilly suggested they put this secret enforcement up to a meta discussion, or at least add it to the published rules.

The mod went ballistic. I could hardly believe their response. It started with crazy accusations that I was the owner of some competing social media source. Then it devolved to deranged threats and lies. I was commanded not to question the moderator.

And then despite not having made a public post or disobeying the mod’s unwritten rules, they rage sanctioned me anyway. Had to file a report with Reddit Admin that was finally upheld a couple days ago.

I watched as numerous other posts would pop up, vanish quickly, and the user would just be... gone. Presumably those users are being mass banned by the moderator.

So your theory is probably quite sound... that the subreddit isn’t so much being impacted as they are probably a very large part of sabotaging themselves.

The choice of one moderator to be an unofficial propaganda organ and practice heavy suppression/bullying is playing out fairly predictably. The other moderators are letting it happen because they engage during the US Big Brother season. It illustrates most of the themes of how some people react to having small amounts of power.

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.

> something seems to have seriously murdered the subreddit

That’s one potential interpretation. But from observing it closely, it’s probably more of suicide than a homicide.

The show opted to terminate viewer feeds. Subreddit engagement actually increased when that was announced, as fans protested.

But right when the season began, a moderator arbitrarily started suppressing that protest, attacking and threatening users who did so.

I’d be interested to have OP crunch some data on that period, from before the season. Some data (like how many users were just driven away by the suppression and being made unwelcome by the sub) may be impossible to get.

Yes the dither/crosshatch is quite hard to make out.

I would have suggested one season’s data elements all be shades of a colour, and the other season’s constituents be shades of a different colour. Like s10 all shades of rose, pink, red. And s11 be aquamarine, teal, blue, etc.

Yeah, I don’t actually have experience with the Big Brother sub, but he mods another one and was just like… legitimately insane when confronted about basic issues. Wasn’t letting anyone post any content that wasn’t completely “family friendly” (think g rated - in a subreddit about a show that is fully uncensored and very much like… not g-rated. Just totally incoherent, removing posts and comments left and right. It was so bizarre.

I think he’s just some guy who got in early but isn’t all there mentally. So it’s kind of a shame that he alone is able to tank some pretty large subreddits

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.

Nobody knows the true reason. Lots of clearly false ones were floated by the show operator.

The most plausible is that it’s a combination of misguided groupthink and a desire to create something catering to brand sponsors.

There’s a few important pieces of background. One is that there’s a very co-mutual element of social media promotion to Big Brother Canada production. One can’t exist without the other. Social media influence has saved and boosted the show on several key occasions.

Also, BB Canada relies heavily on corporate sponsors who fund the commercials and in return get heavy in-show product promotion and exposure. Really heavily.

In some ways, it’s inspired work to see brands being so heavily included. Every episode is jam packed with sponsor branding, including competitions and regular events. Players eat at a mini Wendy’s drivethrough. Regular meals come from a meal kit subscription business and the house refrigerator is a sponsored billboard. The rooms are sponsor themed and decorated.

So anyway, the likeliest scenario is production promised sponsors increased social media presence in the form of these so-called “digital dailies”. That much was obvious as many of them were just players doing practical informercials for products and services. Like meal kit subscriptions or home cleaning appliances.

But it appears that to hedge this bet on “digital daily” infomercial-laden content, they were scared to have that compete against the traditional video feeds, which couldn’t be curated and contrived for sponsors.

So, having decided to kill feeds, they need a cover story. They chose to first blame fan toxicity, and to try and fraudulently claim some kind of mental health high road.

That was debunked pretty quickly, so the next excuse was cost.

But people saw through that. The feeds are a free byproduct of the show’s production of filming everything. Video streaming is pervasive in 2023. All the same costs are already sunk, so feeds doesn’t add any cost, and that lie was kind of obvious.

The next was to claim feeds can’t be monetized. Yes, people actually tried claiming this. In a world where ad-based video streaming is incredibly pervasive and commoditized. Where there’s scores of platforms that could have been instant turnkey revenue.

So they switched to pretending the daily releases were going to be better, unfiltered but more distilled.

But once revealed, they were clearly not. They were late, limited, and infrequent. Excuses were floated about the semantics of what “dailies” are, or should be.

The subreddit moderator going to war on the fans who questioned this hasn’t helped.

And now, this week, production has suspended the “dailies” without explanation. And yes, of course, subreddit moderator is still telling people not to critique it. This is the mod’s current statement:

“Complaints about the lack of live feeds will be removed” along with this fake justification: “as to not clog up the thread.”

Or this gem: “frustrating as this news is, please don’t […] post to vent frustrations about the lack of live feeds.”

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

You're correct, unfortunately.

I mean I’m a mod. I just do it because I like the food network.

That being said, a lot of people in general are not all there. I don’t think it’s too out there or too cruel to guess that many people online also aren’t

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