Thread by @BillyGiese, LONG THREAD. Here's my take: the game of Big Brother isn't broken; [...]

LONG THREAD. Here's my take: the game of Big Brother isn't broken; however, the current meta is stale. Having dominant alliances take control of the early game has happened before. Heck, All-Stars 1 was run by one group for 32 days straight. #BB22 is currently on Day 24.

So, what's the difference? Other than half the current enraged stans not even being born yet, I'd wager it comes down primarily to a nasty Cerberus of casting, competitions, and crappy twists. And this twitter chain here is only scraping the tip of the iceberg.

Casting is complicated. I think BB casts are criticized more harshly because we see all of their mistakes. Survivor, we see what the producers want us to see. So BB appears to have dumber players. But ultimately I think we need more aggressive play. People willing to shake it up.

BB22 will be an anomaly due to COVID. I don't blame the producers here - I'm thankful we get something to chew on. But going forward, we need diversity in the cast - and I'm talking about age, about personality types, about origins. And yes, race too. It'll be 2021 soon.

I think a diverse cast of aggressive players would be incredible. No more pawns. I want Kings and Queens. And they can't have more than like 1.7k followers on Instagram. Sorry, don't have time for your MLM garbage.

As far as competitions... we need more mental and crapshoot competitions. When seasons become increasingly more physical (especially in the endgame), we see the same make-up occur. If this doesn't change, it's going to get worse than it is right now. Smart players will know this.

The funny thing is that despite Janelle/Kaysar dominating BB7, only 2 of the first 8 comps were physical. The rest were mental. But they still dominated the first 4 weeks. But guess what? That's rare. It doesn't usually happen. Not for 4 straight weeks anyway. Maybe 3, but not 4.

The BIGGEST difference in the early game for older BB was more crapshoot and trivia comps. It meant either random people would win power, or the house was more or less on an equal playing field. Modern BB prefers skill-based comps involving physicality. Makes for better live TV.

But it also means certain players are always more likely to win. Which means certain alliances are more likely to get formed. Which has been the case for a while now, and was rapidly spurred on by crappy twists that unintentionally encouraged safer gameplay.

It was spurred on with Battle of the Block in BB16. BotB encouraged a big alliance to form. Combined with more comps, and more physical comps at that, it made sense to rally the players to one group. Although BotB meant you could kinda get anyone since it was a numbers game.

Larger casts, longer seasons, wilder twists, meant you need safety in numbers to survive. If you can guarantee safety through comps, nothing else matters. And then, on top of that, every season in this era of the show began to have MORE comps made for TV via comp-based twists.

And because of how effective the BB16 mega-alliance was, we've seen shades of replication every season since. Similar effect with the Brigade in BB12, though that wasn't comp or twist-based, and proved more difficult to pull off because social dominance is a tougher cookie.

So what's the fix?

More diverse casting all around.
More random, trivia-based competitions, and earlier.
New competitions wouldn't hurt either. I've scoured the BB Wiki for longer than I'd like to admit - BB16 began this comp recycling era.

And lastly, introduce social twists.

The game of Big Brother isn't broken - it's just been found out and the current meta has turned stale. And go figure, many All-Stars know this and are leaning into it (and have been lucky too, as always).

It'll require change all around to see a difference, but it can happen.

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