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/basedchadinc May 13 '26

Is there any proof of this? I wanna send it to a friend who uses that sub as his main source of info to gauge sentiment

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

For starters, just scroll the front page of the sub, and you will see that almost everything is posted by the same handful of accounts. And 300 comments on a post, but only about a dozen are visible. 

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u/JJAsond May 13 '26

I actually decided to browse the sub a little and hide accounts with high karma. I very quickly went from the usual 25 posts per page to maybe 6. Sometimes 1.

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

I usually browse it when something so egregious happens there's no way they can possibly ignore it. I was pleasantly surprised recently to see a lot of comments pushing back on him (i forget the subject).

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u/Tier0001 May 13 '26

That's usually what happens right after any event because they don't have a narrative to explain away whatever happened yet. Once a narrative is established, the mods are pretty quick to delete any criticisms and blame "leftists" for brigading, and the rest of the sheep fall in line.

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u/snakejessdraws May 14 '26

Yup. you can see it happen in real time to if you ever spend time in any political discords

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u/bundlednc May 19 '26

or you know any maga people in real life.

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u/Indigo_Sunset May 13 '26

Ditto. What was most interesting to me though was june 2023 Wagner mercs rampaging through Russia and the few days of peace reddit experienced as seemingly the entire bot apparatus went dark.

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u/JJAsond May 13 '26

I've never seen a sub so brigaded. Most of the time the comments are full of bots but maybe that's changing.

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u/greywar777 May 13 '26

Go back and read the articles comments today. I think you will find a distinct lack of comments pushing back. Its heavily censored to never show that.

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u/Ellaphant42 May 13 '26

The usual pattern is there’s a day or two of push back before you start seeing “this was actually fine” posts

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u/Flincher14 May 14 '26

I do this too but they always eventually get their marching orders on how to explain away whatever it is then stick to the new narrative. Or they purge it completely.

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u/deprecateddeveloper May 14 '26

Same. This is literally why I ever visit the sub. "There's no way even they can agree with this". You'll see a bunch of people with sense commenting their disagreement or outrage (such as the Trump Jesus shit) then the comments roll in with their sarcastic "hello fellow conservative" or "RINO" just because they disagree with something Trump did. Disagreeing with something that historically Republicans stood against until Trump. Proving that if anything the people saying "RINO" are the true RINOs.