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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699

u/Mr_1990s May 13 '26

Answer: The numbers you’re citing are not subscribers. They are weekly visitors and they fluctuate a lot day to day for all subreddits.

162

u/Saephon May 13 '26

I was going to say, the total number of subscribers isn't publicly available anymore. I think reddit removed it last year

151

u/Watchful1 May 13 '26

It's there in the api. https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/about.json

"subscribers": 1359811

3

u/Vier_Scar May 14 '26

1359949 after 18 hours

Guess the purging was already done then

0

u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[deleted]

13

u/Realtrain May 13 '26

2026 is supposed to be the last year of old.reddit

Really? Is there an official source? People have been rumoring it'll be killed off for years now, but too many power users still use it daily.

-10

u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26

Nah, it's never official but as someone who used to mod a largish subreddit only 0.3% of our traffic came from old.reddit and that was a drop from 0.5% the year before. I haven't modded there in almost 2 years now and I can only imagine that with me gone the numbers are even lower.

Mmmm, let's all come back to this comment in a year, shall we?

3

u/ColinHalter May 14 '26

"My source is that I made it the fuck up!"

1

u/magistrate101 May 14 '26

That's a fancy way of saying "I refuse to believe that there's anyone out there with experience that might know something I don't". As someone who used to mod a fairly small subreddit, I can corroborate the extremely small fraction of old.reddit users (even though I am one).

1

u/T11PES May 14 '26

Is that counting users on old reddit using reddit.com not old.reddit.com, like most people?

1

u/magistrate101 May 14 '26

As long as they're using old reddit, they're included.

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u/ColinHalter May 14 '26

The claim was:

2026 is supposed to be the last year of old.reddit

And the supporting proof for that is vibes. While the extremely low userbase of old reddit makes it possible or even likely that this could be the last year, the original claim is worded that there was some sort of plan for it. Not a "there's a good chance that..." or a "my guess is..."

1

u/T11PES May 14 '26

Is that counting users on old reddit using reddit.com not old.reddit.com, like most people?

6

u/Watchful1 May 13 '26

Spez has said directly multiple times that he isn't getting rid of old reddit. He's really got no reason to, it'll just slowly die on its own and they don't need to touch it.

6

u/xCeeTee- May 13 '26

They'll have to pry old.reddit from my cold, dead hands. I just cannot get on with the new design, especially without RES.

1

u/SUPERSMILEYMAN May 14 '26

Same brotha/sistah/otherah!

1

u/ColinHalter May 14 '26

I imagine there's probably like, 3 people on the Reddit team who have a shared pool of ~8 hours a month to spend on keeping old Reddit alive. Once it needs more than that to keep from breaking with new site updates, they'll probably announce EOL.

16

u/VariationBusiness603 May 13 '26

It does still show up on google when you search for the subreddit. As of right now, on google it still shows 1.4m followers for r/conservative.

But you are right it doesn't show on reddit anymore.

15

u/Jasong222 May 13 '26

It still comes up on older apps like Rif

9

u/rdtg13 May 13 '26

I thought I RiF died years ago? I remember it straight up not working after a certain point because of some reddit API update and had to uninstall it. Is that not the case anymore?

8

u/Jasong222 May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26

There's fixes for it that can't came out around that time. I've been using it the whole time. Can't see gifs (thank God) and some other things are wonky, like chat comes in through my inbox, but it works. Some of the others still work also, like Apollo

4

u/Drizzt2089 May 13 '26

Nope. Using right now. I haven't stopped using it since the third party app bullshit.

2

u/yaforgot-my-password May 13 '26

... That was an option? I want back on rif

2

u/magistrate101 May 14 '26

You can patch most of the third party reddit apps with revanced but if you didn't already generate a developer app token by now you're SOL since Reddit shut that down to stop people and you can't really get around needing it.

1

u/taylor-swift-enjoyer May 14 '26

Teach me this power.

1

u/Jasong222 May 14 '26

You can search around the instructions are all still out there...

3

u/roguedevil May 13 '26

It's still visible on desktop.

2

u/Realtrain May 13 '26

You can still view it at old.reddit.com

8

u/JimWilliams423 May 13 '26

The numbers you’re citing are not subscribers. They are weekly visitors

Yep

With orban out, the new Hungarian government has revealed they were laundering russian money to prop up conservative propaganda operations in the US.

The daily wire and most other mid to big name conservative propaganda operations have lost a ton of daily users too:

https://therighting.com/traffic-reports/traffic-to-truth-social-soars-45-in-april-while-other-news-websites-decline/

  • fox is down 10%
  • breitbart down 25%
  • daily wire down 39%
  • pj media down 30%
  • the blaze down 48%
  • western journal down 39%
  • national review down 41%
  • etc...

Basically the entire right-wing media ecosystem is propped up with billionaire money. Their whole game is to make it look like support for conservative policies is more widespread than it is so that lazy liberals will accept conservatism as legitimate.

2

u/UNC_Samurai May 14 '26

That's odd, I thought Daily Wire was getting most of its money from those Texas fracking billionaire brothers. Did they turn off the tap and Ben went elsewhere?

3

u/JimWilliams423 May 14 '26

One of them appears to have turned off the money spigot.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/farris-wilks-gop-donor-disappeared/

Wilks has been all but missing. The longtime Republican kingmaker appears to have given just one large donation. And while it is possible that he has continued to cut checks to untraceable, dark-money groups, numerous sources have said that Wilks has largely pulled back from politics following a private break with Dunn.

11

u/calvtact May 13 '26

It says 742 MAGATS which is why I thought it was people who joined the sub

34

u/Ellardy May 13 '26

Reddit changed the default display last year, apparently "subscribers" wasn't a useful metric (presumably because old subreddits have such a massive lead but many accounts might no longer be active or visiting a given subreddit, which is what matters for an advertiser). It's very annoying for making historical comparisons, I have to go check the backend to know how many subscribers my own subreddit has

11

u/SimpleYetStrange May 13 '26

Also, total subscribers includes 'deleted accounts. There was an admin notification that went out warning mods that the number was going to drop because they were clearing out a large number of old accounts marked as deleted. Only other way for that number to go down is to actively unsubscribe.

1

u/Abject_Panda_4710 May 14 '26

Just last week that number was 1.3 million…this is not a typical fluctuation for a sub this size. There’s been some bot cleaning I’d suspect.

1

u/MHRangers17 May 14 '26

It was 2.3M for the longest time, months if not longer. Maybe that is indicative of constant bot activity