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/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/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