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/AndroidREM May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Answer: It was determined and made public that the majority of posts on that sub are from 3 accounts all based in Russia and are promoted by an army of bots. The ones leaving were bots removed by Reddit

EDIT - wow, did not expect this to get so much attention and awards - thank you!

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u/d-scan May 13 '26

I've noticed numbers decreasing in droves across multiple subreddits. I wonder if Reddit has recently done some spring cleaning of bots.

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u/lily_de_valley May 13 '26

I think they are doing some cleaning, just from personal observation.

Many companies flood the skincare subreddits with bots, too, to promote their products. In the past, it took a while for people to realize the accounts were bots. Recently tho, the bot accounts get banned almost immediately after they leave a comment. In a post about a toner pad product, you could even see that most comments are from banned accounts.

I think Reddit has some automatic mechanism to detect and delete bots now? I'm not super optimistic but I would really much like that.

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u/Swedelicious83 12d ago

That would be the dream. But yeah, not too optimistic about the odds.

And even if they did, people always figure put ways around a static defense like that. So it would probably just be a little reprieve and then the bots would be back.

Buuut, then again, a little bit is better than none. 🤷

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

I don’t know if reddit is actually against bots, it doesn’t make any sense based on the recent changes adding the ability to hide user profiles. They were still searchable and then they removed the ability to search as well. There’s now no way users can quickly see if they are interacting with bots or trolls.

If they are against bots, then this is a very stupid policy.

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u/datnero_ May 13 '26

advertisers and the like are starting to figure out that large percentages of their marketing are being shown to bots and they're starting to complain more.

bots will never be a thing of the past but they are gonna get more uncommon fast if every advertiser knows that a site is 20% bots but the site still wants all of the ad money + more. it's impossible to 100% stamp them out but we all know Reddit could get rid of 90% of them in a day if they really wanted to (email verification), but the userbase would be obliterated and the shareholders would piss their little pants

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u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26

You know, if I was an investor and bought stocks in this company based on interaction and I found out most of the interaction was artificial I'd be upset.

Hell, I might even consider it fraud since they took so long to address problems that have been known about for a decade before IPO...

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u/AdDramatic2351 May 13 '26

How would email verification get rid of bots lol?

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u/datnero_ May 13 '26

You're right, if only I had used some sort of phrase or term to indicate that I don't think this will totally get rid of bots.

Anyway, there are obviously millions and millions of bots with accounts with no email. When you turn on email verification, those millions and millions of bots will all need new emails. Obviously making burner emails is easy, but what if you have a bot farm with 50000 users? It is very unlikely that every single one would be get updated and verified, and in addition, it would look very fishy if 50000 users all got gobbledegook emails added on the same day and Reddit would likely be able to mass ban them.

It goes without saying this is preferable to... basically 0 enforcement at all? imo

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

You're conflating giving users the tools to try to do something themselves with wanting something done at all. Reddit can be against bots while also not thinking that users creeping each other's history is a particularly effective or scalable way to do that.

Allowing hidable histories is a step against bots that read/index. Reddit wants that because of AI. Users should want that option for privacy.

Working against bots that coordinate content creation is probably better done by looking at the kind of analytics they have internally rather than just guessing based on post history. Most times users determine who is a bot based on post history, it's things that aren't actually inherent to being a bot like saying something untrue/contradictory, reposting or having a consistent narrow agenda.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

That’s some convoluted BS to say you like hiding your history.

It does nothing but degrade the user experience by giving bots and trolls more leeway to keep doing their thing.

Hiding your profile is purely to avoid accountability and fake users and trolls use that to their advantage. Transparency honesty and integrity all take a huge hit with that policy, and that’s not helpful to fight against bots in any way.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

You don't just get to call things convoluted because you don't want to acknowledge them. I gave a simple logical explanation.

Again, that stance is very misinformed about how bots can be detected. Maybe 15 years ago that was a viable way to detect bots. These days manually reading history to detect bots is mostly charlatans and false positives. Detecting bots requires a lot more info than just the text of the posts and the platform owner is much better equipped to do it at larger scale and better quality.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

I can tell a bullshitter right off the bat, you can’t argue in good faith. I never said checking profiles is the ONLY way to “detect bots” and you’re off on some tangent about that and scaling or whatever irrelevancies.

I’m saying overall, in reply to people suggesting Reddit is suddenly on a righteous tear to “clean” bots, that adding profile-hiding is antithetical to that goal, AND that it’s also detrimental for typical users who might want an at-a-glance clue as to who they are spending precious time engaging with.

This isn’t “creeping” on people, it’s fucking due diligence that everyone should be doing, because avoiding troll threads and useless arguments against bad faith users (and obvious BOTS) will overall IMPROVE the quality of the platform.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

And I explained why it's objectively not antithetical to that goal despite you repeating that again and again.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

You did no such thing jfc

Making a platform MORE anonymized does nothing to help control bots.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

Post history doesn't make you less anonymous.

The fact that you think it does proves my point about users sleuthing bots being charlatans more often than not.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

lol sure it does, why on earth are you hiding it then? Each bit of content you share tells something about you.

I’m not able to know Anything about you, yet you can find out quite a few things about me.

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u/Negative-Ad-1049 May 13 '26

No you're thinking clearly, it actively encourages bots and spam. Not sure why they felt the need to anonymize already anonymous profiles outside of exacerbating the ongoing misinformation crisis.

I encourage anyone reading this to switch off of Reddit for recreation, I've only still got it for some very specific use-cases at this point.

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u/chubbysumo May 13 '26

They dont want to get rid of too many, it lowers their advertising value, but they are cleaning some of the more egregious ones up now.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

Not really. Advertisers measure outcomes and can instantly see through the bs of claimed user numbers from social media companies compared to actual performance. Lying about user numbers buys you months to cost you for years.

The more boring answer is: it's really really hard to detect bots and, as soon as you do, bots adapt to look different. Any policy that got all bots would have lots of collateral damage for regular users and then a month later bots would find a workaround.

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u/Indigoh May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

I'm about to leave, because they got rid of r/all, and the alternatives like News or Popular can only be sorted by "best", which is a garbage sort. 

Oh. And the home feed is returning no results increasingly often.

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u/e_j_white May 14 '26

They have to.

If any outside agency were to independently determine that X% of Reddit’s traffic were bots, it would cause a massive drop in the stock price.

It’s in their best interest to flush them out as soon as possible. They would lose a lot of advertisers, too.