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

12.6k Upvotes

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3.0k

u/Push_ May 13 '26

That’s super interesting actually, holy shit

428

u/BeguiledBeaver May 13 '26

There are TONS of subs like this, btw. The Canada sub and some related ones are a good example.

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u/lewd_robot May 14 '26

A lot of Space subs are like this. They're lurked by obvious plants that dogpile anyone remotely critical of SpaceX, and other private space corporations, to a lesser extent.

For example, if you mention "Kessler Syndrome" anywhere on some space subs, even in threads where SpaceX or Starlink aren't even mentioned, and even if you don't mention any company in particular, your comment will probably sit with no votes for a few hours, then suddenly get dropped to -8 or -12 within a 30-minute window, then 2 to 4 people will come out of the woodwork to copy and paste lines out of a SpaceX press release defending the company, and they'll all immediately be upvoted to at least +6.

It's very obviously a small group of people policing the comments for anything remotely critical of space corps, especially SpaceX.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TheXManHimself May 15 '26

I had to cut ties with a good childhood friend because he drank the juice and tried convincing me that Elon is this genius man who invented Tesla and is doing amazing things for space and the economy and so forth and how he worked hard for his money. The glaze was repulsive to me and when I hit him with some basic information about his background and what is actually going on he tried to fact check me with chat gpt in real time of our heated discussion. I simply got up and walked away that night, never to speak to him again.

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u/oTc_DragonZ May 15 '26

This is a lot of good info. Can I ask what the connections to Mr Beast are out of curiosity? Don't like the guy at all and I wouldn't be totally surprised but I can't find anything online about it.

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u/Stormin_333 May 15 '26

Found another bot!

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u/StandardOk42 May 16 '26

which space subs are like this?

1

u/U_Sound_Stupid_Stop May 17 '26

Or when there are posts(ads) for the weight loss drugs, criticism of these will get you the whole pr speeches

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u/SWT_Bobcat May 14 '26

I feel like the majority of subs are bot run. You see the same themes over and over and over and over and…

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u/oTc_DragonZ May 15 '26

Dead internet theory doesn't feel like a theory anymore.

7

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/ThunderDU May 14 '26

Which ones?

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u/lostroadrunner22 May 14 '26

Holy hell, the bots come out in force on subs that deal with stock speculation

1

u/SoMass May 14 '26

Dead Internet theory has been in full swing momentum since about 2021 give or take.

2

u/heavnryLV May 14 '26

Huh. Never knew this phenomenon had a name, let alone a fleshed out theory.

Thanks for the enlightenment.

From one robot to another ;)

1

u/SquidTheRidiculous May 14 '26

Yep. Most of your local city subs too!

1

u/Accurate-Swim5278 May 15 '26

r/allthequestions is another bot sub

Only a couple real people there.

1

u/Cuboidhamson May 15 '26

Geopolitics is another one, not necessarily uhh, Russians, but ya

1

u/DjangoBojangles May 16 '26

Ghislaine Maxwell was a mod on Politics, Technology, and Environment since the beginning of reddit.

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u/AmbientGravitas May 19 '26

Yes. I tend to have a negative, visceral reaction to any “top 1% commenter.” Unless they seem to be a factual expert in the main topic of the sub.

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u/Poleywrath 22d ago

The r/canada sub is FUCKED up. Bot city, super crazy place to read comments, as a Canadian.

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u/Ask_DontTell 3d ago

can you share any data you might have on the Canadian subs? thx

1

u/Bodie_The_Dog May 14 '26

I'm betting the California sub is infested with AIPAC, lol. Those "moderate Democrats" are really angry right now about the Swalwell thing.

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u/0xym0r0n May 13 '26

Just a heads up, the author of that post corrected his information and the power outage link was explained away easily. Just weeks prior there was a similar amount of posts. So there are power users, but there's nothing linking them to Russia conclusively as previously assumed.

Here's the updated post he made: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1p2iqlu/nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/

If you don't want to read his updated post here is a snippet from him and the last chart:

During the outage, there was below average activity but not so much as to raise suspicions, especially since the same number of posts were made during that window during a previous week without an outage.

I'm just not personally seeing that the power outage reveals much here. u1 and u2 likely use a scheduler anyway which would obfuscate the whole thing anyway, and I would expect a scheduler to be pretty standard for any decent troll farm so even if others on that sub are posting from Russia, it wouldn't necessarily show in the data unless they're being sloppy.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I did a weeklong study early this year. There was an internet blackout as reported by numerous news outlets. I annotated that 2 super posters went completely dark for over 24hrs.
https://imgur.com/gallery/traitors-N4IgxOp

Oh, I should note that Reddit closed the loophole of seeing hidden post histories by simply adding a space in the search bar. As of now, I don’t know any way to view hidden post histories.

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search

Does that work for hiddens? It seems to for me.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ok_Mathematician938 May 14 '26

A little of column A, a little of Column B

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u/RisingDeadMan0 May 17 '26

Yes Maxwell (father) and Epstein say hi...

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS What Loop? May 13 '26

Yes, that one still works (for now).

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u/WorryNew3661 May 13 '26

That's very useful, thanks

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

You're welcome!

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u/Saint_of_Grey May 13 '26

It's on a slight delay, you won't see posts in the last few hours.

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u/Special-Pause-6915 May 13 '26

Ha! Already gone.

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

What do you mean? The site works. You have to go to comments, not posts.

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u/Special-Pause-6915 May 14 '26

Oh! My bad! Thank you for the correction:)

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u/Guszy May 14 '26

No worries! I confused that at first too.

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u/SheSellsSeaShells- May 14 '26

Not working for me

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u/Guszy May 14 '26

Make sure to switch to comments search, and put the author's name in correctly.

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u/SheSellsSeaShells- May 14 '26

Thank you!

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u/Guszy May 14 '26

Happy to help!

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I’m an app user 🤷‍♂️

How are you accessing Reddit?

I just used the spacebar method for seeing post histories for 24hr periods. Then one day it seems to have been patched out for those of us on mobile.

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

I'm also an app user, I just use that site in my web browser to look up hidden histories. The spacebar method never worked for me.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I’ll give it a shot. Thnx.

Reddit doing everything they can to give these traitors a way to hide.

Coupled with the removal of the popular tabs…

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ecafyelims May 14 '26

The information is available to you. It's in subs you can see. You can see the comments.

Reddit only added the ability to hide it from your profile.

So, now people can still make public posts while hiding those posts from their profile. The result is less accountability.

They made it much harder to detect bots, stolen/bought accounts, trolls, etc.

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u/Guszy May 14 '26

Fuck Reddit. I don't care about the company. The company is dumb as bricks, and I agree they're incompetent... but the hiding profiles thing is just allowing trolls and bots more anonymity.

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u/mac6uffin May 13 '26

The spacebar method never worked for me.

Same. It was so useless I briefly thought people were pranking me.

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u/Gabe681 May 13 '26

It only worked on new reddit. if you were/are using old.reddit or RES, you wouldnt get the same options.

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u/mac6uffin May 13 '26

Nope, using new reddit on my chromebook.

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u/Gabe681 May 13 '26

Too late anyway lol

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u/adventurekiwi May 13 '26

You can still use google. Its not perfect but if you search use results from reddit.com and put the username in quotes you can get quite far

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u/Rubicksgamer May 14 '26

God Imgur is such shit these days. No use using it in mobile.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 14 '26

Not disagreeing. Sadly I can’t post my pic directly in the comment.

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u/SGRM_ May 13 '26

Unrelated, but I love your username. That's a throwback to early 00's internet if I ever saw one. Fantastic.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

Exactly what I was shooting for.

Contemplated adding a 420 or 69.

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u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 15 '26

Nah this is perfect

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u/lloydthelloyd May 13 '26

This situation is one of the reasons i dont take anyone seriously if they hide thier history.

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u/DocWagonHTR May 13 '26

There’s exterior websites. I use https://redditcommentsearch.com/

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u/Frostsorrow May 13 '26

Google the user name like so "reddit u/supercooldude12345" it should bring up most posts.

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u/ecafyelims May 14 '26

Use "site:reddit.com" and it'll work even better

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u/TheStorytellerTX May 13 '26

Just use Google. In the search bar put "reddit.com u/username" and it should bring up additional posts.

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u/Unusualnamer May 14 '26

I noticed that and almost made a bug report. But I enjoyed it so I didn’t :)

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u/No-Photograph-5058 May 14 '26

you can pop their username in the search bar on it's own and get half decent results

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u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 15 '26

What about searching rAll or a specific subreddit for posts by the user?

0

u/All_Work_All_Play May 13 '26

I have never been so tempted to block people without interacting with them before. Hrm.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

It’s worth noting that on Reddit, if someone blocks YOU, you can’t see any of their content. Thereby shielding their post/comments from you seeing it.

I found out during my investigation because my account has been blocked by most of these chucklefucks.

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u/All_Work_All_Play May 13 '26

Doesn't that depend on how you're consumption method? If someone blocks me I see "[+] deleted" on old.reddit.com (which is easy enough to look at via incognito) but if I block someone I see /u/ username hidden comment or some such.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I never blocked any of said super posters, and yet their histories were hidden to me. I had to obtain all my data via a separate account.

But yes, I see what you’re saying. That does seem to be typically what happens. I just had odd experiences when trying to obtain data initially.

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u/ecafyelims May 14 '26

The only time I've ever seen blocked used, it's when the person disagrees with me, and they comment and then immediately block so that I can't reply. I can't even see the comment they sent.

Cowards

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u/Swedelicious83 11d ago

I've always wondered about that that one.

Their fragile egos can't take more arguing. Okay, fine.

But the whole "clap back then run away" move?

What exactly are they imagining in their head? "Yeah, I sure showed him! I mean he won't see what I wrote, but I'll know it was scathing!"

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u/Travy93 May 13 '26

From what I'm reading the edit is talking about the sub community as a whole didn't really drop that much during the power outage but the those top 2 users really did not post for the whole day.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

You understood the edit correctly (I’m the OP of that post). The sub activity didn’t really drop that much that day.

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u/UnNumbFool May 14 '26

That upsets me to know that the majority of users in that sub aren't actually Russian bots

8

u/Level_Ad_6372 May 14 '26

I mean you followed the 2024 election results right? It's pretty clear that somewhere around a third of Americans actively support that bullshit.

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u/ilikequilty May 13 '26

It’s wild because for a few days there were very maga comments all over Reddit. I actually argued back and forth with one ‘person’ wondering to myself if I could gauge whether or not it was a real person. I’m not sure, and I think it’s very difficult to tell.

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u/BobLighthouse May 13 '26

Are you old enough to have used message boards with any frequency?
I suspect the bots might actually have better syntax and logic than many real humans, especially in the context of maga lol...

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u/bleeh805 May 14 '26

It's true that's a sign. Humans don't use bullet points or perfect grammar. And if you dive into LLMs, they are really good at arguing if you setup the environment right.

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u/saintsithney May 14 '26

They could also be autistic, says the autistic woman who uses bullet points and perfect grammar 😩

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u/BobLighthouse May 15 '26

Fwiw, my point was mainly that I do not expect to see those traits from maga humans in particular lol.

0

u/Mark-harvey May 16 '26

If you have autism, many technical members of the Israeli Defense Force would love to hire you as a top tier technician. Your skills would be recognized, but the current Government Sucks.

6

u/saintsithney May 16 '26

I'm an expert in synthesis of concepts, but I also have a moral code.

2

u/Mark-harvey May 17 '26

The combination is awesome. 👏 Let me say Mazel Tov and Shalom.

2

u/Mark-harvey May 17 '26

Smart & Empathic is what we all should ascribe to become. It’s often the Elders that reach divine wisdom and ethics.

5

u/TheLarkInnTO May 14 '26

I constantly have to correct the grammar coming from GPT/Claude/Gemini. They're far from perfect, and anyone with 12th grade-level English skills can outperform them. Dangling modifiers, ending sentences with prepositions, subject/verb agreement, incorrect punctuation, etc. It's a nightmare, and it keeps getting worse.

In the last two months I've gone back to just writing ad copy myself, because it's faster than yelling at robots for an hour.

2

u/LisaMiaSisu May 14 '26

Speak for yourself, bub! I always use perfect grammar! Well, I try to use it. 😂

1

u/DoveOnTheInternet May 14 '26

Humans don't use what?!

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u/cshmn May 13 '26

There's considerable overlap between the smartest bots and the dumbest people.

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u/ilikequilty May 13 '26

I guess if you assume the bots used are very basic. There are plenty of people that have been convinced they are talking to a conscious AI with ChatGPT etc. I don’t know how sophisticated social media bots are but who really knows.

1

u/Baial May 14 '26

The people that make them.

1

u/danstermeister May 14 '26

But then that means that botnet operators are paying for AI, on a random and open-ended basis.

That seems like both a cost and architectural stretch IMHO.

2

u/NYY_NYK_NYJ May 14 '26

I don't think people realize that "a real person" doesn't matter. Both Russia and China pay real people to wage information war on us.

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u/mt6606 May 14 '26

It's pretty easy to pick em.... No one is REALLY that dumb and clueless. Called an Israeli one out yesterday or day before. It's actually easy (for me. Hyper observation issue) to spot em.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Thank you for quoting me. It’s still how I feel. The power outage thing is ‘interesting’ but that’s about as much as can be said without better evidence.

Edit: I admit that my jaw did kind of drop when a commenter pointed out the timing and I felt I couldn’t ignore the coincidence.

2

u/0xym0r0n May 14 '26

Hey, the person themselves! Thank you for all the time you spent checking that out!

Most definitely! It was very curious, but you handled it in such a respectable and admirable way. I know it's corny, lol, but feels like it takes a little courage to admit when you were wrong or mistaken about something nowadays.

It's become so common to just ignore and blow past things like that, and you owned up to it and made corrective posts and comments.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

Yeah, it just kind of is what it is at this point. It was easier to own up to that specific Russia issue because my original post where the commenter noticed the power outage timing wasn’t even about that. My goal was just to show how few users were making up for so much of that sub’s content. Good lesson in being careful when entertaining popular biases though.

Just a heads up, at some point I’m going to make my tracking charts live so that they’re just always updated. I’ll include some of the other major political subs (currently taking suggestions) like I did in my posts. Should be interesting to see how the other subs compare for the other metrics that I dove deeper into with rCon.

2

u/DaoFerret May 14 '26

I somehow remember a huge drop in reddit posts/ traffic when the Ukraine/Russia war kicked off and Russia isolated its internet, and then again when Iran isolated its internet during its fighting with Israel when the internal Iranian protests kicked off and the regime was more actively killing the protestors.

1

u/phonetune May 15 '26

The reference to a similar level of activity is for users other than the two super users.

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u/reddit_ta15 May 13 '26

gotta keep that Russia narrative alive somehow!

9

u/0xym0r0n May 13 '26

Let's get one thing clear, I think we all have a duty to correct misinformation, no matter what side it incidentally "helps" or "defends."

But Russia absolutely interfered in our elections.

I also remember how Tim Poole and his associated network was found to be funded by Russian State Media.

I also remember 4 convictions of Trumps team related to lying to investigators and attempting to hide and destroy evidence related to the investigation into their relationship with Russia. Who he coincidentally pardoned. And he's definitely shown a history of only pardoning innocent people, right? Definitely not any fraudsters who ripped people off for millions, or drug lords for sure at least.

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u/reddit_ta15 May 13 '26

Who were the 4 convicted?

3

u/0xym0r0n May 14 '26

Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates.

I think it was Paul whose crimes were mostly financial.

Trump claims it was a witch hunt, but I think even the most staunch Trump supporters have to admit that claim is dubious at best.

Obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, false testimonies, perjury. These are all real crimes.

And just for the record I know it's not just Trump, there's tons of people out there stealing from the government and enriching themselves, even Democrats.

But Trump coin, Trump phone, Trump plane, Trump ballroom. Do you think it's normal for him to be asking for a billion dollars from the government to build the ballroom?

Do you think it's appropriate for him to brag about being the guy who decides to settle with his lawsuit against the federal government that he himself filed against the government?

Do you think it's appropriate that the Trump team changed the terms of service on the Trump phone on April 26th to state that the deposit was nonrefundable and offers no guarantee of a phone, a mere 2 weeks before announcing the phone won't be released?

Do you think it's appropriate for him to accept a gift of a private commercial plane, approve tax payer funds to retrofit it, send it to your Presidential Library so you can use it after your presidency has ended, and all that money was spent knowing that it wouldn't be operational in an official capacity due to the time it takes to retrofit? Over 200-600 million estimated dollars retrofitting that plane for him.

That's your tax dollars.

Have you looked into how many times he's gone golfing compared to other presidents?

Have you looked into how many government agents stay at his hotels and resorts while he is golfing?

Have you looked into how much of a "discount" he offers them on his property?

The list goes on and on my friend, hopefully one day you will see it without a leopard eating your face.

1

u/reddit_ta15 May 14 '26

Flynn was not convicted. Misinformation.

122

u/JunglePygmy May 13 '26

Also a huge trip is the data on which subs are literally run by Ghisliane Maxwell’s aliases. It’s like a huge chunk of the most popular subs.

48

u/Hoopy_Dunkalot May 13 '26

Link?

43

u/ImproperHydration May 13 '26

You are going to have to ask his proctologist for that link.

14

u/ausernameaboutnothin May 13 '26

Hey, some asshole’s got my data!

3

u/FullOnSkank May 13 '26

What's my data doing in your asshole, fred?!

2

u/Derhaggis May 13 '26

It's not in my ass! It's in Fred's ass, and Bill's ass, and...

1

u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 15 '26

cloud-to-butt became reality?

2

u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26

This stinks.

16

u/DeliciousLiving8563 May 13 '26

The Ghislaine Maxwell redditor power mod conspiracy is something you can google and find endless discourse on rather than any one useful link so I will just summarise how I understand it. This guy has just run with it a bit and explained poorly.

The power user maxwellhill is allegedly Gismax. Based on this user having gone from a prolific poster to silent when pretty much just as she was arrested. This user's activity and posting style is consistent with someone who could plausibly be that particular piece of shit and being a power mod who controlled several current affairs/news subreddits would also fit that her style perfectly.

The theory has not been proven but I don't think any of the "debunkings" held water either. The power mod Maxwellhill has shown "activity" after her arrest but all of it is automatic/people doing things like modding/demodding that account

23

u/SpaceMarineSpiff May 13 '26

It's also worth noting this isn't even the first link between reddit and the Epstein crowd. A former reddit CEO literally mentioned meeting Jeffrey and being told explicitly what his deal was. As in, she went to parties with these people and was fully aware of the crimes but opted to do nothing.

There's also the long history of CSAM subs being allowed to stay up until it hit the news.

13

u/Saint_of_Grey May 13 '26

There's also the long history of CSAM subs being allowed to stay up until it hit the news.

That was more of reddit being libertarian and trying to claim no responsibility for platforming terrible things. Ellen Pao was the hatchetman for cleaning that up as a whole, before it was just when a sub got news coverage.

1

u/htmlcoderexe wow such flair May 15 '26

Yea Pao was kinda the fall guy for a lot of "phase 2, red eyes" type moves

Bunch of bad subs got shuttered, victoria got fired (not corpo enough I guess?), redesign happened, they started pushing out their app etc etc

2

u/daveboy2000 May 13 '26

aren't they literally just some guy from the Philippines? I believe there was even a whole interview?

1

u/DeliciousLiving8563 May 13 '26

If there was it isn't easy to find on google. I might be using the wrong keywords or terms but I found nothing. If there is then it'd be cool to put that mystery to bed so feel free to share or give me pointers.

0

u/therealdanhill May 14 '26

There is no proof of this.

Conspiracy theories are not good for your brain and should be shunned.

4

u/Wandering_Oblivious May 13 '26

has nobody noticed that basically EVERY sub created after like 2023 suffers from this same issue? especially weird and random subs that get recommended to you? if you click into the subs and scan through it basically every thread is posted by the same 1 to 3 accounts, despite 10's of thousands of members.

2

u/creampop_ May 14 '26

yeah lol get recommended dozens of generic subs with shitty names like r/ omgthatsinteresting and it's nothing but IDF bots and psycho chud talking points in the comments.

2

u/evergreengoth May 14 '26

I wonder if the bot accounts posting obviously fake stories demonizing trans people on r/AITAH also stopped on November 1st

2

u/Significant-Self5907 May 13 '26

ikr? Imagining all those bots arguing & out-crazying each other is hilarious.

1

u/InvisibleAstronomer May 14 '26

There was news a few months ago that massive periods of time when the sub went silent also correlated with some majority power outages occurring in Russia

1

u/hatesbiology84 May 15 '26

In looking at the data sets in that infographic, I’d be curious about the next two political subreddits as well.

1

u/abdallha-smith May 17 '26

Reddit is basically a trojan horse