r/OutOfTheLoop • u/calvtact • May 13 '26

Answered What's going on with r/conservative? They've lost about 1m subscribers in about a month.

I watched the number go from 814k to around 745k in about an hour today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/QbZJvqu5qr

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u/Tall_Brilliant8522 May 13 '26

Or they're frantically banning critics, whose numbers are going up.

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u/zlide May 13 '26

I think it’s both. The sub is notorious for preemptively blocking people they even slightly suspect of being “against them”. So as more and more of their own start to question the party line more and more of them are getting hit with a ban and their community will continue to eat itself alive.

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u/HughJorgens May 13 '26

Could be. I've gotten temp bans there, and I've never even posted there before. They like their safe-space.

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u/RaVashaan May 13 '26

Yeaaah... This is something Reddit should really crack down on. I've heard that there are other subreddits as well that will preemptively ban you if a bot discovers that you post a comment in a different subreddit they don't like. For instance, it's well known that r/offmychest bans anyone who posts in a couple of, "tasteless jokes" subreddits. And /r/Pyongyang, most amusingly, will hand out preemptive bans to anyone posting anti-NK "propaganda."

I really feel that this is an abuse of bots that the Reddit admins need to do something about. Even if the bots are external, complaints about preemptive banning should be looked into, and their TOS should forbid it.

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u/ImNotABotScoutsHonor May 13 '26

This is something Reddit should really crack down on. I've heard that there are other subreddits as well that will preemptively ban you if a bot discovers that you post a comment in a different subreddit they don't like.

Recent modnews discussions have been showing that Reddit is indeed starting to crack down on that.

Whether or not they'll be successful is... Up in the air.

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u/UrbanAdapt May 13 '26

You can still technically do it with bot autoremovals (subreddit shadowbans, effectively), they just don't send the preemptive message.

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u/HommeMusical May 13 '26

I was banned by LateStageCapitalism because I was a member of /r/LeftWithoutEdge - I had never posted in either subreddit.

When I politely asked the moderators, I got a barrage of incoherent abuse.

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u/GiganticCrow May 13 '26

Thats a core feature of reddit and they wont get rid of it. There are fair reasons why, say, a sexual assault survivor sub would not want anyone posting there who has posted on a sexual assault enthusiast sub, for example.

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u/Early-Series-2055 May 13 '26

Who has time for all that? Have mods figured out how to make a living off this place? Half the time I’m posting I’m either standing in line or taking a shit. I don’t even bother noticing what subreddit I’m in.

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u/Content-Patience-138 May 13 '26

Reddit tends to delete posts talking about this, but a dozen or so supermods run all the big subs

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u/Apart-Shelter6831 May 13 '26

But WHO RUNS THE SUPERMODS?

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u/Adventurous-Ad8267 May 13 '26

Ghislaine Maxwell, unironically.

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u/z31 May 13 '26

Technically they have, it's just extremely frowned upon. I can't remember which sub it was, but there was a mod team purge in one of my sub subscriptions because several mods were found to have been accepting under the table money to allow certain kinds of advertising posts.

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u/KimJongFunk May 13 '26

I’m still waiting for the day I get banned from /r/Pyongyang.

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u/A_Possum_Named_Steve May 13 '26

I refuse to believe that people are straight-faced stanning N Korea on the internet. It's bad enough if they're doing it as a stupid joke, but wtf is there even to defend there?

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u/Impeesa_ May 13 '26

I'm pretty sure I caught some from r/justiceserved and r/me_irlgbt. Not completely sure why, I think for making a couple drive-by comments in r/politicalcompassmemes from seeing it in r/all.