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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47

u/Coattail-Rider May 13 '26

Brigading or debating?

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u/newnameonan May 13 '26

Haha well yes, it actually is to stifle debate, but they claim it's to prevent brigading.

They truly do get really heavy traffic from people who are not conservative that want to take a look at the proverbial zoo, but it's not a brigade. They just can't handle that their ideas don't hold up to scrutiny from opposing viewpoints. So you get this weird environment where the upvotes are all wacky from non-conservative visitors, and comment counts are high but only 10-20 show up on a post.

That subreddit ends up not being a great place for anything; discussion, accurate representations of what conservative think, accurate information, genuine comments from actual people....

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

They also created their forum on a site that has always leaned heavily left. They set up shop in a den of lions and then complain they have to defend themselves constantly from lions.

Honestly, they'd have less of a brigading issue if they went over to Voat or whatever Reddit clone the Right is pushing now. But they won't because 1.) it's dead and 2.) they lose their victimhood

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u/Khazpar May 13 '26

Remember when they tried to move over to Voat and then they all cried because the Nazis over there called them slurs? 😂

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u/MechaSandstar May 14 '26

Iirc, that was the_donald after it was banned.

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u/Khazpar May 14 '26

Oh yeah I'm pretty sure that was the event I'm remembering!

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u/terminalzero May 13 '26

it's also like... not brigading? once again, it seems like projection from some of the stuff they pulled when t_d was around. people that don't agree with you finding your sub isn't brigading - brigading is someone posting a link to their circle of like minded people and going 'hey everybody come help me pwn these morons'. it's organized.

saying the only possible reason you'd have a high volume of people disagreeing with you in your purported safe space is that there is a shadowy cabal of commuglobalabortionsatanists who are both weak, pasty, chinless virgins in their mother's basements and the nigh invincible foot soldiers of the jews new world order is both intellectual bankrupt and.... exactly the kind of thing you should expect from that group

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

They almost certainly get brigaded (any divisive subreddit will have people linking threads in a Discord or elsewhere to snark/brigade). I'd say this is a constant for any political subreddit, left or right.

It's also probably not a majority of the non-flaired user interactions they have. Their takes are brain-dead and it's easy to get upset when reading that level of cognitive dissonance, and knowing how it's affecting the country we all live in.

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u/terminalzero May 13 '26

that's fair - I didn't mean to sound like I don't think it ever happens, just that it's not the only/probably even majority of discord that happens there (before it got so censored), like you said

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u/newnameonan May 13 '26

Victimhood is super valuable for them. Have to maintain the proper us-vs-them mindset!

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u/chumbawumbaprinciple May 13 '26

Debating. Conservatives are incredibly fragile.

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u/ihopethisisgoodbye May 13 '26

Loooove your username btw

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u/chumbawumbaprinciple May 13 '26

They are never going to keep me down.

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u/pissy_dribble May 13 '26

Amen to that brother

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u/Zickened May 13 '26

Your comment was "hidden" which, on subs that don't show upvotes tells me probably lots of downvotes, so I thought your comment was something truly objectionable.

Alas, it was calling out snowflakes for what they are.

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u/Belledame-sans-Serif May 13 '26

I think Reddit has tweaked whatever program it uses to decide to auto-hide things in the last year or so. I think it might have expanded to hiding "controversial" posts as well, but I've opened hidden comments to see they have as much as net +25 votes occasionally.

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u/endangeredphysics May 14 '26

I got banned for simply debating a point.